INTRODUCING 
IRONY 


INTRODUCING 
IRONY 


A  BOOK  OF   POETIC  SHORT 
STORIES  AND  POEMS 


MAXWELL  BODENHEIM 


NEW  YORK 

BONI  AND  LIVERIGHT 
1922 


COPYRIGHT,   1922,  BY 

BONI    &    LlVERIGHT,    INC. 

Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


To 

FEDYA  RAMSAY 


WHOSE    HAND    NEVER    LEAVES    MY    SHOULDER 


££8543 


Some  of  the  poems  and  stories  in  this  book  have  ap 
peared  in  The  Dial,  Harper's  Bazar,  The  Little  Review, 
The  Nation,  Cartoons  Magazine,  Poetry,  A  Magazine 
of  Verse,  The  New  York  Globe,  The  Bookman,  Vanity 
Fair,  The  Measure  and  The  Double  Dealer 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

JACK  ROSE n 

SEAWEED  FROM  MARS 13 

TURMOIL  IN  A  MORGUE 18 

CONDENSED  NOVEL 21 

MANNERS 23 

AN    ACROBAT,    A    VIOLINIST,    AND    A    CHAMBERMAID 

CELEBRATE     25 

NOVEL  CONVERSATION 28 

THE  SCRUB-WOMAN .  30 

MEDITATIONS  IN  A  CEMETERY 32 

SIMPLE  ACCOUNT  OF  A  POET'S  LIFE    .   . 34 

CANDID  NARRATIVE 37 

UNLITERARY  AND  SHAMELESS 39 

Two  SONNETS  TO  MY  WIFE 40 

FINALITIES,  I-VIII 41 

IMAGINARY  PEOPLE,  I-IV 47 

UNEASY  REFLECTIONS 50 

SUMMER  EVENING:   NEW  YORK  SUBWAY  STATION  ...  50 

GARBAGE  HEAP 52 

IMPULSIVE  DIALOGUE 53 

EMOTIONAL  MONOLOGUE 56 

PRONOUNCED  FANTASY 59 

WHEN  SPIRITS  SPEAK  OF  LIFE 61 

INSANITY 64 

POETRY 68 

RELIGION 72 

SCIENTIFIC  PHILOSOPHY 75 

[7] 


PAGE 
78 

Music 82 

ETHICS     86 

HISTORY 90 

PSYCHIC  PHENOMENA 94 

LOVE 98 


[8] 


INTRODUCING 
IRONY 


JACK   ROSE 

WITH  crafty  brooding  life  turned  to  Jack  Rose 
And  made  him  heroin-peddler,  and  his  pose 
Was  sullenly  reflective  since  he  feared 
That  life,  regarding  him,  had  merely  jeered. 
His  vanity  was  small  and  could  not  call 
His  egoism  to  the  dubious  hall 
Of  fame,  where  average  artists  spend  their  hour. 
Doubting  his  powers  he  was  forced  to  cower 
Within  the  shrill,  damp  alleys  of  his  time, 
Immersed  in  that  brisk  midnight  known  as  crime. 
He  shunned  the  fiercely  shrewd  stuff  that  he  sold 
To  other  people,  and  derived  a  cold 
Enjoyment  from  the  writhing  of  their  hearts. 
A  speechless  artist,  he  admired  the  arts 
Of  blundering  destruction,  like  a  monk 
Viewing  a  play  that  made  him  mildly  drunk. 
And  so  malicious  and  ascetic  Jack 
Bent  to  his  trade  with  a  relentless  back 
Until  he  tapped  an  unexpected  smile  — 
A  woman's  smile  as  smooth  and  hard  as  tile. 
May  Bulger  pawned  her  flesh  to  him  and  gave 
His  heroin  to  her  brother,  with  a  grave 
Reluctance  fumbling  at  her  painted  lips. 
Though  angry  at  herself,  she  took  the  whips 
Of  undesired  love,  to  quiet  a  boy 
Who  wept  inanely  for  his  favorite  toy. 
She  hated  Jack  because  he  failed  to  gloss 
And  soften  the  rough  surface  of  her  loss, 
His  matter-of-fact  frown  biting  at  her  heart. 
He  hated  her  because  her  smiling  guess 
Had  robbed  him  of  ascetic  loneliness, 


And  when  her  brother  died,  Jack  sat  beside 

Her  grief  and  played  a  mouth-harp  while  she  cried. 

But  when  she  raised  her  head  and  smiled  at  him  — 

A  smile  intensely  stripped  and  subtly  grim  — 

His  hate  felt  overawed  and  in  a  trap, 

And  suddenly  his  head  fell  to  her  lap. 

For  some  time  she  sat  stiffly  in  the  chair, 

Then  slowly  raised  her  hand  and  stroked  his  hair. 


[12] 


SEAWEED    FROM    MARS 
I 

11  "¥"  T  AVE  you  ever  played  on  a  violin 
Larger  than   ten   thousand  stars 
•*"          And  warmer  than  what  you  call  sin?  " 
Torban,  a  young  man  from  Mars, 
Gave  me  the  stretch  of  his  voice, 
And  my  "  no  "  fell  down  like  a  pin 
On  the  echoed  din  of  his  words. 
He  said:  "  Then  I  have  no  choice. 
I  must  use  the  barrenly  involved 
Words  with  which  you  have  not  solved 
The  wistful  riddles  of  your  days. 
Leave  the  pale  and  ruddy  herds 
Of  men,  with  their  surrendering  ways, 
And  come  with  me  to  Mars.  " 


II 

JL/RUMS  of  Autumn  beat  on  Mars, 

Calling  our  minds  to  reunion. 

The  avenues  of  seaweed  spars 

Have  attained  a  paleness 

Equal  to  that  of  earthly  philosophies, 

And  the  trees  have  lost 

The  diamond  violence  of  Spring. 

Their  purple  leaves  have  turned  to  grey 

Just  as  a  human  religion 

Gradually  changes  to  pretence. 

In  Mars  we  have  only  two  seasons, 

Spring  and  Autumn  —  their  reasons 

Rest  in  a  treacherous  sun 

That  suddenly  runs  away, 


Creating  a  twilight-suspense. 

When  the  sun  reappears 

Mars  is  once  more  amazed 

By  the  blazing  flatteries  of  Spring. 

Again  the  heavy  leaves  ring 

With  odor  and  light  deftly  pressed 

Into  a  stormy  chorus. 

Then  we  abandon  the  screaming  violins 

Of  our  minds,  and  each  man  wins 

An  understanding  rest. 

Once  more  we  roam  and  jest 

Upon  the  avenues,  with  voices 

One  shade  louder  than  the  leaves, 

Or  sail  upon  the  choral  seas 

And  trade  our  words  with  molten  ease. 

Throughout  the  Autumn  we  stand 

Still  and  deserted,  while  our  minds 

Leap  into  sweeping  tensions 

Blending  sound  and  form 

Into  one  search  across  the  universe. 

Ill 

HAT  do  we  find  in  this  search? 
All  of  your  earthly  words  lurch 
Feebly  upon  the  outskirts  of  my  mind, 
And  when  they  pass  beyond  them,  they  are  blind. 
Outward  forms  are  but  the  graves 
Of  sound,  and  all  the  different  waves 
Of  light  and  odor,  they  are  sound 
That  floats  unshaped  and  loosely  gowned. 
When  sound  is  broken  into  parts 
Your  ears  receive  the  smaller  arts, 
But  when  it  drifts  in  broad  release 
You  cannot  hear  its  louder  peace. 


Your  houses,  hills,  and  flesh  of  red 
Are  shapes  of  sound,  asleep  or  dead. 
In  Mars  a  stronger  Spring  of  sound 
Revives  our  forms  and  makes  Profound 
Music,  softer  than  the  dins 
That  rose  from  Autumn  violins. 
Our  minds,  whose  tense  excursions  spread 
In  chase  of  noisy  walls  that  fled, 
Relent  and  drop  within  our  heads, 
Enjoying  the  timid  sound  of  their  beds. 
Filled  with  a  gracious  weariness, 
We  place  it,  like  a  lighter  dress, 
Upon  the  sounds  from  other  stars 
Brought  back  to  celebrate  on  Mars. 


IV 


GIRL  of  Mars  is  burning 
Notes  of  thought  within  her  throat. 
Her  pale  white  lips  are  turning 
The  fire  to  storied  chords. 
The  song  is  old  but  often  made 
By  girls  who  sit  in  Spring  and  braid 
The  lanterned  language  of  their  hair. 
Its  spacious  gaiety  cannot  be  sold 
To  your  narrow  glow  of  words. 
The  hint  that  I  shall  give  is  cold 
And  like  the  sound  of  snowy  air. 

/  shall  journey  with  the  men 
When  my  curling  thoughts  are  ten. 

0  the  sternness  of  that  number! 
Colored  sounds  from  breath  to  umber 
Promising  a  first  release. 

1  have  dwelt  too  long  in  peace 


Placing  smallness  on  my  breast. 

The  prisoned  whisper  of  my  skin 

Longs  to  vanish  in  the  din 

Of  Autumn  when  great  sounds  are  caught. 

Let  the  tall  wildness  of  my  thought 

Stride  beside  the  thundering  grace 

Of  the  man  whose  spring-time  face 

Brought  me  tiny  notes  of  rest. 

She  sits  within  a  house  of  stone 
That  lends  a  wise  and  balanced  tone: 
A  roofless  house  whose  walls  are  low 
And  level  with  her  head's  grey  glow. 
The  bright  sounds  of  her  parents  fly 
Around  the  house  —  we  do  not  die 
In  Mars,  but  change  to  gleams  of  sounds 
And  stay  within  our  gayer  rounds 
Until  when  tired  Spring  has  gone 
We  lead  the  Autumn  searchers  on. 
Before  we  change,  our  bodies  curve 
Like  yours  save  that  our  skins  are  gray: 
Light  shades  of  gray  that  almost  swerve 
To  white,  like  earthly  men  who  pray. 


yy  E  do  not  love  and  hate  in  Mars. 
These  earthly  cries  are  flashing  bars 
Of  sound  from  which  our  minds  are  free. 
They  stand  in  our  mythology: 
Legends  elusive  and  weird, 
Acrid  Gods  that  once  were  feared. 
They  vanished  imperceptibly 
And  none  among  us  can  agree 

[16] 


Upon  the  tangled  way  in  which  they  fled. 

Starlit  symbols  of  dread, 

They  slowly  exhausted  themselves  and  died 

In  striding  heralds  of  a  wilder  bride. 

We  have  no  emotions  in  Mars. 

They  are  like  long-healed  wounds 

Whose  scars  are  softened  by  the  gleam  of  our  minds. 

We  approach  them  with  clearer  kinds 

Of  sound  from  deeply  resting  thought. 

Our  youths  and  maidens  have  not  caught 

The  treacherous  and  tightly  bound 

Confusion  of  your  loving  sound, 

For  sex  to  us  is  but  the  ring 

Of  different  shades  of  thought  in  Spring 

When  men  recline  upon  the  breast 

Of  women,  dissolving  into  thoughtful  rest. 

In  Autumn  sex  is  left  behind. 

Men  and  women  no  longer  lined 

By  different  bodies  raise  their  dins 

Above  the  screaming  violins. 


TURMOIL   IN   A   MORGUE 

NEGRO, 
Chinaman, 
White  servant-girl, 
Russian  woman, 
Are  learning  how  to  be  dead, 
Aided  by  the  impersonal  boredom 
Of  a  morgue  at  evening. 
The  morgue  divides  its  whole 
Of  dead  mens'  contacts  into  four 
Parts,  and  places  one  in  each 
Of  these  four  bodies  waiting  for  the  carts. 
The  frankness  of  their  decay 
Breaks  into  contradictory  symbols 
And  sits  erect  upon  the  wooden  tables, 
Thus  cancelling  the  validity  of  time. 
In  a  voice  as  passive  as  slime 
The  negro  speaks. 
"  Killed  a  woman:  ripped  her  skin. 
Saw  her  heart  floating  in  a  tumbler  of  gin. 
Had  to  drink  her  heart  because  it  wouldn't  leave  the  gin. 
Because  I  wanted  to  reach  all  of  her 
They  ripped  my  flesh. 
They  wanted  to  reach  all  of  me 
And  their  excuse  was  better  than  mine.  " 
Cowed  baby  painted  black, 
The  negro  sits  upon  fundamentals 
And  troubles  them  a  little  with  his  hands. 
The  beautiful  insanity 
Of  his  eyes  rebukes 
The  common  void  of  his  face. 
Then  the  Chinaman  speaks 
In  a  voice  whose  tones  are  brass 
From  which  emotion  has  been  extracted. 

[18] 


"  Loved  a  woman:  she  was  white. 

Her  man  blew  my  brains  out  into  the  night. 

Hatred  is  afraid  of  color. 

Color  is  the  holiday 

Given  to  moods  of  understanding: 

Hatred  does  not  understand. 

When  stillness  ends  the  fever  of  ideas 

Hatred  will  be  a  scarcely  remembered  spark.  " 

Manikin  at  peace 

With  the  matchless  deceit  of  a  planet, 

The  Chinaman  fashions  his  placid  immensity. 

The  Chinaman  chides  his  insignificance 

With  a  more  impressive  rapture 

Than  that  of  western  midgets. 

His  rapture  provides  an  excellent  light 

For  the  silhouette  of  the  negro's  curse. 

Then  the  white  servant-girl 

Speaks  in  a  voice  whose  syllables 

Fall  like  dripping  flower-juice  and  offal, 

Both  producing  a  similar  sound. 

"  I  made  a  neat  rug  for  a  man. 

He  cleaned  his  feet  on  me  and  I  liked 

The  tired,  scheming  way  in  which  he  did  it. 

When  he  finished  he  decided 

That  he  needed  a  smoother  texture, 

And  found  another  lady. 

I  killed  myself  because  I  couldn't  rub  out 

The  cunning  marks  that  he  left  behind.  " 

Impulsive  doll  made  of  rubbish 

On  which  a  spark  descended  and  ended, 

The  white  servant-girl,  without  question  or  answer, 

Accepts  the  jest  of  a  universe. 

Then  the  Russian  woman 

Speaks  in  a  voice  that  is  heat 

Ill-at-ease  upon  its  couch  of  sound. 

[19.1 


"  I  married  a  man  because 

His  lips  tormented  my  melancholy 

And  made  it  long  to  be  meek, 

And  because,  when  he  walked  to  his  office  each  morning, 

He  thought  himself  a  kindled  devil 

Enduring  the  smaller  figures  around  him. 

He  abandoned  me  for  German  intrigue 

And  I  chased  him  in  other  men, 

Never  quite  designing  him. 

Death,  a  better  megalomaniac, 

Relieved  me  of  the  pursuit.  " 

Symbol  of  earth  delighted 

With  the  vibration  of  its  nerves, 

The  Russian  woman  sunders  life 

Into  amusing  deities  of  emotion 

And  bestows  a  hurried  worship. 

Then  the  morgue,  attended  by  a  whim, 

Slays  the  intonations  of  their  trance 

And  slips  these  people  back  to  life. 

The  air  is  cut  by  transformation. 

The  white  servant-girl  retreats  to  a  corner 

With  a  shriek,  while  the  negro  advances, 

And  the  Russian  woman 

Nervously  objects  to  the  Chinaman's  question. 

The  morgue,  weary  housewife  for  speechless  decay, 

Spends  its  helplessness  in  gay  revenge: 

Revenge  of  earth  upon  four  manikins 

Who  straightened  up  on  wooden  tables 

And  betrayed  her. 


[20] 


CONDENSED   NOVEL 

SHUN  the  abundant  paragraphs 
With  which  a  novelist  interviews  shades 
Of  physical  appearance  in  one  man, 
And  regard  the  body  of  Alvin  Spar 
Curtained  by  more  aristocratic  words. 
"  Alvin  Spar  in  adolescence 
Was  neither  slim  nor  rotund, 
But  slightly  aware  of  future  corpulence. 
The  face  that  Aristotle  may  have  had 
Was  interfering,  bit  by  bit, 
With  an  outer  face  of  pouting  curves. 
Alvin  Spar  in  youth 
Held  half  of  the  face  that  Aristotle 
May  have  had,  and  the  pungent  directness 
Of  a  stable-boy. 
Alvin  Spar  in  middle  age 
Had  the  face  that  Aristotle 
May  have  had  —  a  large  austerity 
Disputing  the  bloom  of  well-selected  emotions. 
Straight  nose,  thick  lips,  low  forehead 
Were  apprentices  to  the  austerity 
That  often  stepped  beyond  them. 
Alvin  Spar  in  old  age 
Had  drawn  the  wrinkled  bed-quilts 
Over  the  face  that  Aristotle 
May  have  had,  but  his  eyes  peered  out, 
Fighting  with  sleep.  " 
Shuffle  the  cards  on  which  I  have  written 
Alvin  Spar's  changes  in  physical  appearance, 
And  deal  them  out  to  the  various  players. 
Accident  first,  then  the  qualities  of  the  players 
These  two  will  struggle  to  dominate 
The  movements  of  the  plot. 

[21] 


The  plot  of  this  novel  will  ascend 

In  twenty  lines  and  escape 

The  honoured  adulteration  so  dear  to  men. 

"  Alvin  Spar  loved  a  woman 

Who  poured  acid  on  his  slumber 

By  showing  him  the  different  fools  within  him. 

Sincerely  longing  for  wisdom 

He  married  her,  while  she  desired 

A  pupil  whom  she  could  lazily  beat. 

She  convinced  him  that  emotions 

Were  simply  periods  of  indecision 

Within  the  mind,  and  with  emphasis 

He  walked  to  another  woman. 

The  second  woman  loved  him, 

But  she  was  merely  to  him 

Clay  for  mental  sculpture. 

She  killed  herself,  believing 

That  he  might  become  to  her  in  death 

A  figure  less  remote  and  careful. 

He  forgot  her  in  an  hour 

And  used  the  rest  of  his  life 

In  finding  women  over  whom  he  could  tower.   . 

He  died  while  madly  straying  over  his  heights.  " 

The  incidental  people,  chatter,  and  background? 

You  will  find  them  between 

Pages  one  and  four-hundred 

Of  the  latest  bulk  in  prose. 


[22] 


MANNERS 

GINGERLY,  the  poets  sit. 
Gingerly,  they  spend 
The  adjectives  of  dribbling  flatteries, 
With  here  and  there  a  laceration 
Feeding  on  the  poison  of  a  smile. 
In  the  home  of  the  poet-host 
That  bears  the  slants  of  a  commonplace, 
Eagerly  distributed - 
The  accepted  lyrical  note  — 
The  poets  sit. 

The  poets  drink  much  wine 
And  tug  a  little  at  their  garments, 
Weighing  the  advantages  of  disrobing. 
(It  is  necessary  to  call  them  "  poets  " 
Since,  according  to  custom, 
Titles  are  generously  given  to  the  attempt.) 
Sirona,  cousin  of  the  poet-host, 
Munches  at  the  feast  of  words. 
She  endeavors  to  convince  herself 
That  her  hunger  has  become  an  illusion. 
The  poets,  capitulating  to  wine, 
Leave  their  birds  and  twilights, 
Their  trees  and  cattle  at  evening, 
And  study  Sirona's  body  — 
Their  manacled  hands  still  joined 
By  the  last  half-broken  link. 
Beneath  her  ill-fitting  worship 
Young  Sirona  fears 
That  the  poets  are  wordy  animals 
Circled  by  brocaded  corsets.   .    .    . 
Sirona,  if  you  stood  on  your  head 
Now,  and  waved  the  brave  plan  of  your  legs, 
Undisturbed  by  cloth, 

[23] 


The  poets  would  be  convinced 

That  you  were  either  insane  or  angling. 

But  an  exceptional  poet, 

Never  present  at  these  parties, 

Would  compliment  your  vigour 

And  scoff  at  the  vain  deceptions  of  privacy. 

Vulgarity,  Sirona,  is  often  a  word 

Invented  by  certain  men  to  defend 

Their  disdain  for  other  men,  who  chuckle 

At  the  skulking  tyrannies  of  fashion. 

Few  men,  Sirona,  dare  to  become 

Completely  vulgar,  but  many 

Nibble  at  the  fringes. 


AN   ACROBAT,   A  VIOLINIST,   AND 
A   CHAMBERMAID    CELEBRATE 

GEOMETRY  of  souls. 
Dispute  the  roundness  of  gesturing  flesh; 
Angles,  and  oblongs,  and  squares 
Slip  with  astounding  precision 
Into  the  throes  of  lifted  elbows; 
Into  the  searching  perpendicular 
Of  fingers  rising  to  more  than  ten; 
Into  the  salient  straightness  of  lips; 
Into  the  rock-like  protest  of  knees. 
The  flesh  of  human  beings 
Is  a  beginner 's-lesson  in  mathematics. 
The  pliant  stupidity  of  flesh 
Mentions  the  bungling  effort 
Of  a  novice  to  understand 
The  concealed  mathematics  of  the  soul. 
Men  will  tell  you  that  an  arm 
Rising  to  the  sky 
Indicates  strident  emotion; 
Reveals  a  scream  of  authority; 
Expresses  the  longing  of  a  red  engine 
Known  as  the  heart; 
Rises  like  a  flag-pole 
From  which  the  mind  signals. 
Men  will  fail  to  tell  you 
That  an  arm  rising  to  the  sky 
Takes  a  straight  line  of  the  soul 
And  strives  to  comprehend  it; 
That  the  arm  is  a  solid  tunnel 
For  a  significance  that  shoots  beyond  it. 
The  squares,  and  angles,  and  oblongs  of  the  soul, 
The  commencing  lines  of  the  soul 
Are  pestered  by  a  debris  of  words. 

[25] 


Men  shovel  away  the  words: 
Falteringly  in  youth; 
Tamely  and  pompously  in  middle  age; 
Vigorously  in  old  age. 
Death  takes  the  last  shovel-full  away: 
Death  is  accommodating. 
Nothing  is  wise  except  outline. 
The  content  held  by  outline 
Is  a  slave  in  the  mass. 
Men  with  few  outlines  in  their  minds 
Try  to  give  the  outlines  dignity 
By  moulding  them  into  towers  two  inches  high, 
In  which  they  sit  in  lonely,  talkative  importance. 
Men  with  many  outlines 
Break  them  into  more,  and  thus 
Playing,  come  with  quickened  breath 
To  hints  of  spiritual  contours. 
Seek  only  the  decoration; 
Avoid  the  embryonic  yelping 
Of  argument,  and  scan  your  patterns 
For  angles,  oblongs,  and  squares  of  the  soul. 
I  overheard  this  concentrated  prelude 
While  listening  to  an  acrobat,  a  violinist,  and  a  chamber 
maid 

Celebrate  the  removal  of  their  flesh. 
While  playing,  the  violinist's  upper  arm 
Bisected  the  middle  of  the  acrobat's  head 
As  the  latter  knelt  to  hear, 
And  the  chambermaid 

Stretched  straight  on  the  floor,  with  her  forehead 
Touching  the  tips  of  the  violinist's  feet. 
Motion  knelt  to  receive 
The  counselling  touch  of  sound, 
And  vigour,  in  a  searching  line, 
Reclined  at  the  feet  of  sound, 

[26] 


Buying  a  liquid  release. 

Angles  of  arms  and  straight  line  of  bodies 

Made  a  decoration. 

The  violinist's  music 

Fell  upon  this  decoration; 

Erased  the  vague  embellishment  of  flesh; 

And  came  to  angles,  squares,  and  oblongs 

Of  the  soul. 


[27] 


NOVEL   CONVERSATION 

CERTAIN  favorite  words  of  men  have  gathered  in  a 
vale  made  of  sound-waves.     These  words,  far  re 
moved    from    human    tongues    and    impositions, 
enjoy  an  hour  of  freedom. 

Emotion 

Men  believe  that  I  can  speak 

Without  the  aid  of  thought. 

True,  I  have  murdered  many  kings, 

Leaned  upon  many  cheeks, 

And  sought  the  release  of  music, 

But  when  I  ride  upon  words 

I  am  forced  to  steal  them  from  the  mind. 

Forgive  me,  now,  if  a  trace  of  thought 

Invades  my  liquid  purity! 

Truth 

You  need  not  defend  your  argument 
With  meek  verbosity, 

As  though  you  dreaded  its  possible  subtleties. 
We  are  not  men,  but  words! 
Men  have  made  me  a  lofty  acrobat 
Entertaining  each  of  their  desires 
With  some  old  twist  on  the  bars. 
But  let  us  leave  the  frantic  tasks 
Forced  upon  us  by  men. 
This  is  our  grove  of  rest. 

Intellect 

Emotion,  we  have  often  crept 
From  our  separate  palaces, 
Asking  each  other  for  secret  favors. 

[28] 


Emotion 

We  laughed  because  the  men  who  made  us 
Could  not  see  our  desperate  trading. 
We  will  end  our  laugh 
Upon  the  dust  of  the  last  man  on  earth 
And  taste  a  peaceful  strangeness. 

Art 

And  I,  the  tortured  child  of  your  love, 
Will  slip  from  the  fringe  of  your  grayness 
Into  the  void  from  which  I  came. 

Poetry 

And  I,  the  moment  when  your  arms 
Touched  each  other  in  the  night, 
Will  no  longer  strive 
To  tell  the  happening  to  men. 

Fantasy 

And  I,  the  glistening  whim 

Of  your  secret  love, 

Will  change  to  a  question  lurking  within  your  dust. 

Suggestion 

And  I,  the  beckoning  second 

When  you  curved  a  world  in  the  twist  of  your 

fingers  - 
I  shall  vanish  into  your  completeness. 

Intellect 

The  hope  of  this  magic  ending 

Is  our  only  consolation. 

Emotion,  a  new  philosopher 

Is  forging  blades  for  your  torture, 

And  a  braggart  poet 

Invites  me  to  his  disdain. 

Let  us  return  to  our  burdens. 

[29] 


THE   SCRUB-WOMAN 

(A  Sentimental  Poem) 

TIME  has  placed  his  careful  insult 
Upon  your  body. 
In  other  ages  Time  gave  rags 
To  hags  without  riches,  but  now  he  brings 
Cotton,  calico,  and  muslin  — 
Tokens  of  his  admiration 
For  broken  backs. 

Neat  nonsense,  stamped  with  checks  and  stripes, 
Fondles  the  deeply  marked  sneer 
That  Time  has  dropped  upon  you. 
While  Time,  in  one  of  his  well-debated  moods 
That  men  call  an  age,  is  attending  to  his  manners, 
I  shall  scan  the  invisible  banners 
Of  meaning  that  unfurl  when  you  move. 


II 

HEN  you  open  your  mouths 
I  see  a  well,  and  strangled  chastity 
At  the  bottom  —  not  chastity 
Of  the  flesh,  but  lucid  purity 
Of  the  mind  choked  by  a  design 
Of  filth  that  has  slowly  turned  cold, 
Like  a  sewer  intruding 
Upon  a  small,  dead  face. 
This  is  not  repulsive. 
Only  things  alive,  with  gaudy  hollows, 
Can  repulse,  but  your  death  holds 
A  haggard  candour  that  gently  thrusts  its  way 
Into  the  unimportance  of  facts. 
You  are  not  old:  you  were  never  young. 

[30] 


Life  caressed  your  senses 

With  a  heavy  sterility, 

And  you  thanked  him  with  the  remnant 

Of  thought  that  he  left  behind  — 

His  usual  moment  of  absentminded  kindness. 

When  the  muscles  of  your  arm 

Punish  the  brush  that  rubs  upon  wood 

I  see  a  rollicking  mockery  — 

Rhythm  in  starved  pursuit 

Of  petrified  desire. 

When  the  palms  of  your  hands 

Stay  flat  in  dirty  water 

I  can  observe  your  emotions 

Welcome  refuse  as  perfume, 

Intent  upon  a  last  ghastly  deception. 

When  you  grunt  and  touch  your  hair 

I  perceive  your  exhaustion 

Reaching  for  a  bit  of  pity 

And  carefully  rearranging  it. 

Lift  up  your  pails  and  go  home; 

Take  the  false  tenderness  of  rest; 

Drop  your  clothes,  disordered,  on  the  floor. 

Vindictive  simplicity. 


MEDITATIONS   IN   A   CEMETERY 

You  can  write  nothing  new  about  death 

GEROID     LATOUK 

DEATH, 
Grandiosely  hackneyed  subject, 
I  live  in  a  house  one  hundred  years  old 
Placed  in  the  middle  of  a  cemetery. 
The  cemetery  is  bothered  by  mausoleums 
Where  fragments  of  Greek  and  Gothic 
Lie  in  orderly  shame. 
Slabs  and  crosses  of  stone 
Remain  unacquainted  with  the  bones 
That  they  must  strive  to  introduce. 
The  trees  retain  their  guiltless  sibilants. 
The  trees  tell  me  upon  my  morning  walk: 
"  In  other  cemeteries, 
Shakespeare,  Maeterlinck  and  Shaw 
Fail  to  produce  the  slightest  awe 
In  trees  that  do  not  create  for  an  audience. " 
Being  finalities,  the  grass  and  trees 
Find  no  need  for  rules  of  etiquette. 
Delicacy  must  be  effortless 
Or  else  it  changes  to  a  patched-up  dress. 
But  delicate  and  coarse  are  words 
For  quickness  that  tries  to  linger, 
And  slowness  that  strives  to  be  fast! 
Emotions  and  thoughts  are  merely 
The  improvisations  of  motion, 
And  lack  a  permanent  content. 
An  aging  tree  is  wiser 
Than  an  aging  poet, 
And  death  is  wiser  than  both. 
The  scale  ascends  out  of  sight 
And  I  recall  that  the  morning  is  light 

[32] 


And  smaller  notes  await  me. 

The  tomb-stones  around  my  path 

Have  been  crisply  visited  by  names 

To  which  they  bear  no  relation. 

Imagine  the  perturbation 

Of  a  stone  removed 

From  the  comprehension  of  a  mountain 

And  branded  with  the  name  of  A.  Rozinsky! 

Recollecting  journeys  of  my  own, 

I  close  my  eyes  and  leave  the  stone. 

The  names  of  other  men  entreat  — 

Slight  variations  in  line 

Ponderously  refusing  to  resign. 

Men  who  will  be  forgotten 

Try  to  hinder  the  process  with  stone. 

Because  they  dread  the  affirmation 

Of  ashes  undiscovered  in  wind, 

I  am  walking  through  this  cemetery. 

The  old  grave-diggers  will  soon 

Astonish  the  earth  below  this  oak. 

From  their  faces  adjectives  have  fled, 

Leaving  the  essential  noun: 

Leaving  also  the  unwilling  frown 

With  which  they  parley  with  the  earth  .    . 

Death,  I  must  tell  you  of  these  things 

Since  you  are  unaware  that  they  exist. 

You  send  an  efficient  servant 

To  the  almost  unseen  fluctuations 

Of  tomb-stones,  skulls,  and  lilies, 

Reserving  your  eyes  for  larger  games. 


[33] 


SIMPLE   ACCOUNT   OF   A   POET'S 
LIFE 

IN  1892 
When  literature  and  art  in  America 
•  Presented  a  mildewed  but  decorous  mien, 
He  was  born. 

During  the  first  months  of  his  life 
His  senses  had  not  yet  learned  to  endure 
The  majestic  babble  of  old  sterilities. 
The  vacuum  of  his  brain 
Felt  a  noisy  thinness  outside, 
Which  it  could  not  hear  or  see, 
And  gave  it  the  heavier  substance 
Of  yells  that  were  really  creation 
Fighting  its  way  to  form. 
(When  babies  shriek  they  seek 
Power  in  thought  and  action. 
Life  objects  to  their  intent 
And  forces  their  voices  to  repent.) 
At  the  age  of  four  he  lived  inwardly, 
With  enormous  shapeless  emotions 
Taking  his  limbs,  like  waves. 
His  mind  was  vapour  censured 
By  an  occasional  protest 
That  mumbled  and  could  not  be  heard. 
People  to  him  were  headless  figures  — 
Bodies  surmounted  by  voices 
That  tickled  like  feathers,  or  struck  like  rocks. 
Missiles  thrown  from  moving  mountain-tops 
And  leaving  only  resentment  at  their  touch. 
At  ten  the  voices  receded 
To  invisible  meanings 
That  toyed  with  flesh-protected  secrets  of  faces. 

[34] 


The  voices  made  promises 

Which  the  faces  continually  evaded, 

And  often  the  voices  in  vengeance 

Changed  a  lip  or  an  eye-brow 

To  repeat  their  neglected  demands. 

When  swung  to  him  the  voices 

Were  insolent  enigmas, 

Tripping  him  as  he  stood 

Midway  between  fright  and  indifference. 

He  sometimes  tittered  tranquilly 

At  the  obvious  absurdity  of  this. 

His  rages  were  false  and  sprang 

From  aloof  thoughts  chanting  over  their  chains. 

The  immediate  cause  of  each  rage 

Merely  opened  a  door 

Upon  this  changeless  inner  condition. 

That  species  of  intoxicated  thought 

Which  men  describe  as  emotion 

Used  its  merriment  to  blind  his  eye-sight. 

But  anger,  whose  real  roots  are  in  the  mind, 

Tendered  him  times  of  hot  perception. 

He  noticed  that  children  held  flexible  flesh 

That  wisely  sought  a  variety  of  patterns  - 

Flesh  intent  upon  correcting 

Its  closeted  effect  — 

While  older  people  enticed  their  flesh 

Into  erect  and  formal  lies 

Repeated  until  their  patience  died 

And  they  tried  an  unpracticed  rebellion. 

This  was  a  formless  revelation, 

Unattended  by  words 

But  throwing  its  indistinct  contrast 

Over  his  broad  one-colored  thought. 

At  sixteen  he  employed  words 

To  flay  the  contrast  into  shapes. 

[35] 


At  seventeen  he  decided 

To  emulate  the  gay  wisdom  of  children's  flesh. 

He  deliberately  borrowed  whiskey 

To  wipe  away  the  lessons  of  older  people 

Lest  they  intrude  their  sterility 

Upon  his  plotting  exuberance. 

He  placed  his  hands  on  women, 

Gently,  boldly,  as  one 

Experimenting  with  a  piano. 

He  stole  money,  begged  on  street-corners, 

And  answered  people  with  an  actual  knife 

Merely  to  give  his  thoughts  and  emotions 

A  changing  reason  for  existence. 

Moderation  seemed  to  him 

A  figure  half  asleep  and  half  awake 

And  mutilating  the  truth  of  each  condition. 

At  twenty-four  his  flesh  became  tired, 

And  to  amuse  the  weariness 

His  hands  wrote  poetry. 

He  had  done  this  before, 

But  only  as  a  gleeful  reprimand 

To  the  speed  of  his  limbs. 

Now  he  wrote  with  the  motives  of  one 

Whose  flesh  is  passing  into  less  visible  manners. 

At  times  he  returned  to  more  concrete  motions, 

To  befriend  the  handmaiden  of  his  flesh, 

But  gradually  he  longed 

For  the  complete  secrecy  of  written  creation, 

Enjoying  the  novelty  of  a  hiding-place. 

In  1962 

He  died  with  a  grin  at  the  fact 

That  literature  and  art  in  America 

Were  still  presenting  a  mildewed,  decorous  mien. 


[36] 


CANDID    NARRATIVE 


A  chorus-girl  falls  asleep  and,  in  a  dream,  speaks  to  a 
former  lover.  In  her  dream  she  holds  the  intelli 
gence  of  a  poet  but  still  clings  to  certain  of  the 
qualities  and  mannerisms  of  her  wakeful  self. 

SAY,  kid,  I'm  in  a  candid  mood; 
The  kind  of  mood  that  silences 
The  babbling  dampness  of  my  character. 
I'm  feeling  as  improbable 
As  an  overworked  Grecian  myth 
Fainting  amid  the  smells  of  a  Ghetto. 
Now,  Hypocrisy 
Always  slinks  along 
Winking  an  opaque  eye  at  reality. 
But  when  he  spies  a  fantasy 
He  feels  disgraced  and  leaves  in  haste. 
What's  the  use  of  telling  a  lie  to  a  lie? 
So,  since  I'm  only  a  dream, 
Listen  to  my  candid  scream. 
You  like  to  press  a  rouged  cheek 
Against  your  obscurity, 
Like  a  third-rate  poet 
Pasting  a  sunset  upon  his  emptiness. 
Bashful  mountebanks  like  you 
Can  seduce  the  eloquent  delusion 
Of  time  and  give  it  a  speechless  limp. 
The  insincere  trickle  of  your  words 
Was  neither  silence  nor  sound 
But  falteringly  tempted  both, 
Like  a  tiny  fountain  unnoticed 
At  the  feet  of  two  large  coquettes 

[37] 


The  intricate  laziness 

Of  your  dimpled  face 

Received  a  petulantly  naked 

Ghost  of  thought,  and  seized  it  without  desire. 

Again  it  held  the  furbished  effigies 

Of  sensuality 

And  tried  to  give  them  life 

From  the  weariness  of  my  face. 

Yet  I  could  have  endured  you 

But  for  the  fact  that  your  moustache 

Scraped  across  my  lips 

Like  a  clumsy  imitation  of  passion. 

Trivial  insults  have  tumbled  down 

The  pillared  complacency  of  empires 

Just  as  the  thrust  of  your  lips 

Tripped  my  mercenary  balance. 

My  lover  now  has  the  face  of  a  dog, 

With  each  corner  of  his  lips 

Pointing  to  a  different  Heaven, 

Yet  his  greed  and  melancholy 

Sometimes  fondle  each  other 

Upon  the  pressures  of  his  mouth, 

And  the  monotony  of  his  kiss 

Does  not  dissolve  my  stoicism. 

Women  who  measure  their  gifts  for  lovers 

Never  hope  for  more  than  this. 


[38] 


II 

UNLITERARY    AND    SHAMELESS 

A  young  woman  who  has  been  renounced  by  her  lover, 
because  of  her  lack  of  culture,  answers  his  derision. 

Y  OUR  cloistered  naughtiness 
Makes  me  as  boisterous 
As  a  savage  attending 
A  minstrel-show  of  regrets. 
The  pampered  carefulness 
With  which  you  distil  a  series 
Of  standardized  perfumes  from  life 
Takes  its  promenade 

Between  the  realms  of  sanity  and  madness. 
You  are  too  precise  to  be  quite  sane 
And  too  evasive  to  be  insane, 
And  all  that  you  have  left  me 
Is  a  mood  of  windy  sadness  — 
Emotions  becoming  verbose 
In  a  last  thin  effort 
To  persuade  themselves  that  they  loved 
A  jewel  that  slipped  from  your  fingers. 
Your  mind  is  a  limpid  warehouse 
Filled  with  other  mens'  creations, 
And  you  pilfer  a  bit  from  each, 
Disguising  the  scheme  of  your  culture. 
I  would  rather  be  a  naked  fool 
Than  a  full-gowned  erudite 
Imitation  of  other  mens'  hands. 
I  shall  marry  a  desperado 
And  give  him  strength  with  which  to  paint 
Black  angels  and  muscular  contortions 
On  panels  of  taffeta. 

[39] 


TWO   SONNETS  TO   MY   WIFE 


BECAUSE  her  voice  is  Schonberg  in  a  dream 
In  which  his  harshness  plays  with  softer  keys 
This  does  not  mean  that  it  is  void  of  ease 
And  cannot  gather  to  a  strolling  gleam. 
Her  voice  is  full  of  manners  and  they  seem 
To  place  a  masquerade  on  thought  and  tease 
Its  strength  until  it  finds  that  it  has  knees, 
And  whimsically  leaves  its  heavy  scheme. 

Discords  can  be  the  search  of  harmony 
For  worlds  that  lie  beyond  the  reach  of  poise 
And  must  be  captured  with  abandoned  hands. 
The  music  of  my  wife  strives  to  be  free 
And  often  takes  a  light,  unbalanced  voice 
While  madly  walking  over  thoughtful  lands. 

II 

MY  wife  relents  to  life  and  does  not  speak 
Each  moment  with  a  deft  and  rapid  note. 
Sometimes  a  clumsy  weirdness  finds  in  her  throat 
And  ushers  in  a  music  that  is  weak 
And  bargains  with  the  groping  of  her  heart. 
But  even  then  she  plays  with  graver  tones 
That  do  not  sell  themselves  to  laughs  and  moans 
But  seek  the  counsel  of  a  deeper  art. 

She  drapes  her  loud  emotions  in  a  shroud 

Of  glistening  thought  that  waves  above  their  dance 

And  sometimes  parts  to  show  their  startled  eyes. 

The  depths  of  mind  within  her  have  not  bowed 

To  sleek  emotion  with  its  amorous  glance. 

She  slaps  its  face  and  laughs  at  its  surprise! 

[40] 


FINALITIES 


PRETEND  that  night  is  grandiose, 
That  stars  win  graves  in  every  ditch; 
Pretend  that  moon-light  is  verbose 
And  affable,  like  some  grande-mere, 
And  men  will  say  that  your  despair 
Seduces  luminous  conceits, 
Or  call  you  an  anaemic  fool 
Who  stuffs  himself  with  curdled  sweets. 
Thus  sentenced  to  obscurity, 
You  can  find  more  turbulent  lips 
And  spaciously  retreat  from  men 
Immersed  in  pedestals  and  whips. 
Amusedly,  you  can  say  that  stars 
Are  wizened  jests  on  every  ditch; 
That  moon-light  is  a  trick  that  jars 
Your  mind  intent  on  other  minds. 
Having  agreed  upon  your  station, 
Men  will  no  longer  heed  your  words, 
And  with  a  galloping  elation 
You  can  contradict  yourself  in  peace. 

II 

HE  wary  perturbations  of  convinced 
And  secretly  disdainful  men  are  mild 
And  deftly  tepid  to  the  ears  of  one 
Who  entertains  a  careless,  ungloved  child. 
Above  the  sprightly  idleness  of  plates 
Men  sit  and  feign  industrious  respect, 
With  eye-brows  often  slightly  ill  at  ease- 
Cats  in  an  argument  are  more  erect. 


At  last  the  tactful  lustres  of  farewells 

Are  traded:    each  man  strolls  off  and  forgets 

The  other  —  not  a  frill  is  disarranged. 

The  tension  dexterously  avoids  regrets. 

Two  men  have  unveiled  carved  finalities 

And  made  apologies  for  the  event, 

With  voices  well-acquainted  with  a  task 

Devoid  of  nakedness  and  ornament. 

And  each  man  might  have  murmured,  "  Yes,  I  know 

What  you  will  say  and  what  I  shall  reply," 

And  each  man  might  have  watched  the  other  man 

Smile  helplessly  into  his  mutton-pie. 

Ill 

J[   HIS  farcical  clock  is  copying 
A  wood-chopper  with  nimble  poise, 
While  Time,  with  still  and  fluid  strides, 
Perplexedly  listens  to  the  noise. 
The  room  that  holds  this  joke  is  filled 
With  the  relaxed  complacencies 
Of  poets  hiding  from  themselves 
With  measured  trivialities. 
But  one  among  them  walks  about 
And  watches  with  embarrassed  eyes. 
The  others  do  not  speak  to  him: 
His  nudeness  is  a  tight  disguise. 
This  fool  is  anxious  to  display 
Interrogations  of  his  mind 
To  poets  who  at  work  and  play 
Are  isolated  from  their  kind. 
Reluctantly  he  finds  his  room, 
Sits  on  the  floor,  with  legs  tucked  in, 
And  grins  up  at  another  clock 
Aloofly  measuring  its  din. 

[42] 


IV 

HEN  you  are  tired  of  ogling  moltenly, 
Your  undertones  explosively  confess. 
A  shop-girl  coughing  over  her  cigarette 
Expresses  the  burlesque  of  your  distress. 
Take  your  cocaine.     It  leaves  a  blistering  stain, 
But  phantom  diamonds  are  immune  from  greed. 
You  pluck  them  from  the  buttons  of  your  vest, 
Wildly  apologising  for  your  need. 
Take  more.     Redress  the  thinness  of  your  neck 
With  diamonds;   entertain  them  with  your  breast; 
Cajole  them  on  the  floor  with  fingertips 
That  cannot  pause,  dipped  in  a  demon's  zest. 
If  you  had  not  relented  to  a  man 
Who  meddled  with  your  face  and  stole  your  clothes, 
Your  shrill  creative  pleasures  might  be  still 
Incarcerated  in  the  usual  pose. 
Hysteria  shot  its  fist  against  your  face 
One  day,  and  left  the  blood-spot  of  your  mouth, 
But  when  the  morning  strikes  you  there  will  be 
More  than  hysteria  in  your  answering  shout. 


[DAUGHTER  is  a  skeleton's  applause: 
Grief  sells  increase  to  sterility: 
Happiness  protects  its  subtle  flaws. 
These  three  significances  make 
The  part  of  you  that  men  can  see, 
As  you  recline  upon  this  bed, 
Your  hand  defending  one  bare  knee, 
Your  shoulders  trapped  upon  the  quilt. 
But  under  the  warm  sophistry 
That  turns  your  flesh,  another  form 

[43] 


Abstractly  bellicose  and  free 

Attacks  the  answer  of  your  blood. 

Freedom  is  the  lowest  note 

Of  slavery,  and  slavery 

The  lowest  freedom  —  you  can  feel 

The  charm  of  your  servility. 

True,  you  were  once  a  chamber-maid 

Who  won  a  thief  and  spoke  to  grief, 

And  now  your  limbs  have  numbly  strayed, 

Are  these  not  harmless  travesties? 


VI 


have  pockets  into  which 
They  crowd  too  many  trinkets. 
You  feel  this,  talking  to  the  rich 
And  lightly  bulging  mountebank. 
Untie  the  knots  that  close  your  bag 
And  tempt  him  with  a  creed  or  need. 
Be  as  loquacious  as  a  hag 
Who  loves  the  details  of  her  wares. 
There  is  a  relish  when  you  speak 
To  one  who  cannot  understand: 
You  celebrate  upon  a  peak 
And  prod  his  helpless  effigy. 
This  is  an  unimportant  game 
To  men  evading  holidays, 
But  introspection  becomes   tame 
Unless  it  compliments  itself. 
The  lightly  bulging  mountebank 
Is  but  an  interval  in  which 
You  take  your  garments  off  and  thank 
The  privacy  that  he  bestows. 

[44] 


VII 

LyIKE  other  men  you  fly  from  adjectives. 
The  plain  terseness  that  lives  in  verbs  and  nouns 
Creates  a  panorama  where  you  know 
That  men  are  not  a  cloud  of  romping  clowns. 
You  greet  the  wideness  of  eternal  curves 
Where  beauty,  death  and  silence  give  their  height 
To  those  rare  men  who  do  not  play  with  thought. 
But  this  fruit-peddler  decorates  his  fright 
And  polishes  his  peaches  and  his  grapes 
Insanely.     If  his  mercenary  hopes 
Were  bolder  he  would  be  a  nimble  poet. 
Slight  in  her  bridal  gown,  his  mind  elopes 
With  adjectives  that  find  her  incomplete: 
Your  mind  is  hard  and  massively  parades 
Across  the  earth  with  Homer  and  Villon. 
Since  each  of  you  with  common  sense  evades 
Monotony,  I  join  you  and  refuse 
To  call  you  dwarf  or  giant.     Let  the  fools 
Who  criticise  you  bind  you  with  these  names 
And  separate  your  dead  bones  with  their  rules! 

VIII 

JL/EAD  men  sit  down  beside  the  telephones 
Within  your  brain  and  carefully  relate 
Decisions  and  discretions  of  the  past, 
Convinced  that  they  will  not  deteriorate. 
But  you  have  not  their  certainty:  you  try 
A  question  now  and  then  that  cautiously 
Assaults  their  whispered  indolence  until 
Their  sharp  words  once  more  force  you  to  agree. 
Then  you  insist  that  certain  living  men 
Whose  tones  are  half-discreet  may  be  allowed 

[45] 


To  greet  their  masters  through  the  telephones, 
Provided  that  their  words  are  not  too  loud. 
The  new  men  imperceptibly  entice 
Their  elders,  and  a  compromise  is  made, 
Both  sides  discovering  that  two  or  three 
Excluded  men  must  be  correctly  flayed. 
And  so  the  matter  ends;  conservative 
And  radical  revise  their  family-tree, 
While  you  report  this  happening  with  relief 
To  liberals  and  victorious  cups  of  tea. 


1 46] 


IMAGINARY    PEOPLE 


POET 

YOU  have  escaped  the  comedy 
Of  swift,  pretentious  praise  and  blame, 
And  smashed  a  tavern  where  they  sell 
The  harlots'  wine  that  men  call  fame. 
Heralds  of  reckless  solitude 
Have  offered  you  another  voice, 
But  men  are  still  a  tempting  jest. 
You  roam  and  cannot  make  a  choice. 
When  you  have  played  distractedly 
With  a  humility,  you  tire 
And  change  the  pastime  to  a  pride. 
These  are  but  moods  of  one  desire. 
You  throw  an  imitating  gleam 
Upon  the  dwarfs  that  line  your  road, 
Then  with  a  worn  hostility 
You  tramp  along  beneath  your  load. 


II 
WOMAN 

J[    O  hide  your  isolation,  you  become 
Tame  and  loquacious,  bowing  to  the  men 
Who  bring  you  ornaments  and  poverties. 
Your  cryptic  melancholy  dwindles  then, 
Solved  by  the  distant  contrast  of  your  words. 
Your  loneliness,  with  an  amused  relief, 
Sits  listening  to  your  volubility 
And  idling  with  an  enervated  grief. 

[47] 


The  play  does  not  begin  until  you  say 

Your  last  "  good-night,"  for  you  have  only  made 

A  swindled  fantasy  regain  its  parts. 

Throughout  the  night  you  held  an  unseen  blade 

Upon  your  lap  and  trifled  with  its  hilt, 

And  now  you  lift  it  with  submissive  dread. 

Should  you  attack  your  loneliness  and  grief 

Now  that  they  are  asleep?     You  shake  your  head. 


Ill 
CHILD 

puffs  of  smoke  inquisitively  blown 
Across  the  slight  transparency  of  dawn, 
The  births  of  thought  disperse  upon  your  face. 
A  tenuous  arrogance,  when  they  have  gone, 
Clings  to  its  tiny  wisdom  and  denies 
The  feeble  challenge.     Warm  emotions  swarm 
Upon  the  flushed  impatience  of  your  face 
And  merge  to  lordly,  evanescent  form. 
New  sights  bring  light  oppression  to  your  mind. 
You  struggle  with  a  hunger  that  transcends 
The  glistening  indecisions  of  your  eyes 
And  wins  a  flitting  certainty.     Your  trends 
Lead  to  a  fabled  turmoil  that  escapes 
The  stunted  messengers  of  trembling  thought. 
Yet,  when  your  hand  for  moments  closes  tight 
You  feel  a  dagger  that  your  fears  have  caught. 


[48] 


IV 

OLD    MAN 


B 


ELOW  your  skull  a  social  gathering  glows. 
Weak  animosities  exchange  a  last 
Chat  with  emotional  ambassadors 
Who  honor  the  importance  of  your  past. 
You  turn  your  hammock  and  surrender  limbs 
To  sunlight,  and  increase  the  hammock's  swing 
As  though  you  suavely  bargained  with  a  friend. 
Its  answers  are  impersonal  and  bring 
A  tolerance  that  wounds  your  lack  of  strength. 
A  final  insurrection  cleaves  your  rest. 
You  raise  your  back,  then  lower  it  convinced 
That  motion  now  would  be  a  needless  test.   .    .    . 
And  with  your  falling  back,  the  gathering 
Within  your  head  melts  through  a  door,  chagrined, 
And  everything  within  you  dies  except 
A  blue  and  golden  hammock  in  the  wind. 


[49] 


UNEASY    REFLECTIONS 

DETERMINEDLY  peppered  with  signs, 
The  omnibus  ambles  without  curiosity. 
Southampton  Row,  Malborne  Road, 
Charing  Cross  — 
These  names  have  no  relation 
To  the  buildings  they  partition 
If  one  mutters,  "  I  shall  go  to  Euston  Road," 
Imagination  is  relieved  of  all  errands 
And,  decently  ticketed,  enters  the  omnibus. 
If  one  muttered,  "  I  shall  go  to  protesting  angles, 
Surreptitiously  middle-aged, 
And  find  a  reticent  line  to  play  with," 
One  would  violate 
The  hasty  convenience  of  labels 
And  seriously  examine  one's  destination. 
If  poplar-trees,  brief  violets  and  green  glades 
On  any  country  road  had  each  received 
An  incongruous  name  —  Smith's  Tree, 
C.  Jackson's  Clump,  or  Ferguson's  Depression  — 
And  city  streets  had  never  known  a  label, 
Most  poets  would  have  turned  their  fluid  obsession 
On  lamp-posts  and  the  grandeur  of  ash-cans. 
It  would  be  grimly  realistic  now 
To  write  about  a  violet  or  a  cow. 


SUMMER   EVENING:   NEW   YORK 
SUBWAY-STATION 

PERSPIRING  violence  derides 
The  pathetic  collapse  of  dirt. 
An  effervescence  of  noises 
Depends  upon  cement  for  its  madness. 

[50] 


Electric  light  is  taut  and  dull, 

Like  a  nauseated  suspense. 

This  kind  of  heat  is  the  recollection 

Of  an  orgy  in  a  swamp. 

Soiled  caskets  joined  together 

Slide  to  rasping  stand-stills. 

People  savagely  tamper 

With  each  other's  bodies, 

Scampering  in  and  out  of  doorways. 

Weighted  with  apathetic  bales  of  people 

The  soiled  caskets  rattle  on. 

The  scene  consists  of  mosaics 

Jerkily  pieced  together  and  blown  apart. 

A  symbol  of  billowing  torment, 

This  sturdy  girl  leans  against  an  iron  girder. 

Weariness  has  loosened  her  face 

With  its  shining  cruelty. 

Round  and  poverty-stricken 

Her  face  renounces  life. 

Her  white  cotton  waist  is  a  wet  skin  on  her  breast; 

Her  black  hat,  crisp  and  delicate, 

Does  not  understand  her  head. 

An  old  man  stoops  beside  her, 

Sweat  and  wrinkles  errupting 

Upon  the  blunt  remnants  of  his  face. 

A  little  black  pot  of  a  hat 

Corrupts  his  grey-haired  head. 

Two  figures  on  a  subway-platform, 
Pieced  together  by  an  old  complaint. 


GARBAGE-HEAP 

THE  wind  was  shrill  and  mercenary, 
Like  a  housewife  pacing  down  the  sky, 
Green  weeds  and  tin-cans  in  the  yard 
Made  a  debris  of  ludicrous  dissipations. 
The  ochre  of  cold  elations 
Had  settled  on  the  cans. 
Their  brilliant  labels  peeped  from  the  weeds, 
Like  the  remains  of  a  charlatan. 
A  bone  reclined  against  a  fence-post 
And  mouldily  congratulated  life. 
A  woman's  garter  wasted  its  faded  frills 
Upon  a  newspaper  argument. 
The  shipwrecked  rancor  of  bottles  and  boxes 
Was  pressed  to  disfigured  complexities. 
A  smell  of  torrential  asperity 
Knew  the  spirit  of  the  yard. 

Contented  or  incensed, 

The  wreckage  stood  in  the  yard, 

One  shade  below  the  sardonic. 


IMPULSIVE   DIALOGUE 

Poet 

Will  you,  like  other  men, 
Offer  me  indigo  indignities? 

Undertaker 
Indigo  indignities! 

The  words  are  like  a  mermaid  and  a  saint 
Doubting  each  other's  existence  with  a  kiss. 

Poet 

The  words  of  most  men  kiss 
With  satiated  familiarity. 
Indigo  is  dark  and  vehement, 
But  one  word  in  place  of  two 
Angers  barmaids  and  critics. 

Undertaker 

Straining  after  originality 
You  argue  with  its  ghost! 
A  simple  beauty,  like  morning 
Harnessed  by  a  wide  sparkle 
And  plodding  into  the  hearts  of  men, 
Cannot  reach  your  frantic  juggling. 

Poet 

I  can  appreciate 

The  spontaneous  redundancy  of  nature 

Without  the  aid  of  an  echo 

From  men  who  lack  her  impersonal  size. 

Undertaker 

The  sweeping  purchase  of  an  evening 
By  an  army  of  stars; 
The  bold  incoherence  of  love; 

[S3] 


The  peaceful  mountain-roads  of  friendship  — 
These  things  evade  your  dexterous  epigrams! 

Poet 

A  statue,  polished  and  large, 
Dominates  when  it  stands  alone. 
Placed  in  a  huge  profusion  of  statues 
Its  outlines  become  humiliated. 
Simplicity  demands  one  gesture 
And  men  give  it  endless  thousands. 
Complexity  wanders  through  a  forest, 
Glimpsing  details  in  the  gloom. 

Undertaker 

I  do  not  crave  the  dainty  pleasure 
Of  chasing  ghosts  in  a  forest! 
Nor  do  I  care  to  pluck 
Exaggerated  mushrooms  in  the  gloom. 
I  have  lost  myself  on  roads 
Crossed  by  tossing  hosts  of  men. 
Pain  and  anger  have  scorched  our  slow  feet: 
Peace  has  washed  our  foreheads. 

Poet 

Futility,  massive  and  endless, 

Captures  a  stumbling  grandeur 

Embalmed  in  history. 

In  my  forest  you  could  see  this 

From  a  distance  and  lose 

Your  limited  intolerance. 

Simplicity  and  subtlety 

At  different  times  are  backgrounds  for  each  other, 

Changing  with  the  position  of  our  eyes. 

Death  will  burn  your  eyes 

With  his  taciturn  complexity. 

[54] 


Undertaker 

Death  will  strike  your  eyes 
With  his  wild  simplicity! 

Poet 

Words  are  soldiers  of  fortune 

Hired  by  different  ideas 

To  provide  an  importance  for  life 

But  within  the  glens  of  silence 

They  meet  in  secret  peace.   .    .    . 

Undertaker,  do  you  make  of  death 

A  puffing  wretch  forever  pursued 

By  duplicates  of  vanquished  forms? 

Or  do  you  make  him  a  sneering  King 

Brushing  flies  from  his  bloodless  cheeks? 

Do  you  see  him  as  an  unappeased  brooding 

Walking  over  the  dust  of  men? 

Do  you  make  him  an  eager  giant 

Discovering  and  blending  into  his  consciousness 

The  tiny  parts  of  his  limitless  mind? 

Undertaker 

Death  and  I  do  not  know  each  other. 
I  am  the  stolid  janitor 
Who  cleans  the  litter  he  has  left 
And  claims  a  fancied  payment. 

Poet 

Come  to  my  fantastic  forest 
And  you  will  not  need  to  rise 
From  simple  labours,  asking  death 
For  final  wages. 


EMOTIONAL   MONOLOGUE 

A  man  is  sitting  within  the  enigmatic  turmoil  of  a  rail 
road  station.  His  face  is  narrow  and  young,  and  his 
nose,  lips,  and  eyes  carved  to  a  Semitic  sharpness, 
have  been  sundered  by  a  bloodless  catastrophe.  A 
traveling-bag  stands  at  his  feet.  Around  hint 
people  are  clutching  farewells  and  shouting  greet 
ings.  Within  him  a  monologue  addresses  an  empty 
theatre. 

I   AM  strangling  emotions 
And  casting  them  into  the  seats 
Of  an  empty  theatre. 
When  my  lifeless  audience  is  complete, 
The  ghosts  of  former  emotions 
Will  entertain  their  dead  masters. 
After  each  short  act 

A  humorous  ghost  will  fly  through  the  audience, 
Striking  the  limp  hands  into  applause, 
And  between  the  acts 
Sepulchral  indifference  will  mingle 
With  the  dust  upon  the  backs  of  seats. 
Upon  the  stage  a  melodrama 
And  a  travesty  will  romp 
Against  a  back-drop  of  fugitive  resignation. 
Climax  and  anti-climax 
Will  jilt  each  other  and  drift 
Into  a  cheated  insincerity. 
Sometimes  the  lights  will  retire 
While  a  shriek  and  laugh 
Make  a  martyr  of  the  darkness. 
When  the  lights  reappear 
An  actor-ghost  will  assure  the  audience 
That  nothing  has  happened  save 

[56] 


The  efforts  of  a  fellow  ghost 

To  capture  life  again. 

In  his  role  of  usher 

Another  ghost  will  arrange 

The  lifeless  limbs  of  the  audience 

Into  postures  of  relief. 

Sometimes  a  comedy  will  trip 

The  feet  of  an  assassin, 

Declaring  that  if  ghosts  were  forced 

To  undergo  a  second  death 

Their  thinness  might  become  unbearable. 

At  other  times  indignant  tragedy 

Will  banish  an  intruding  farce, 

Claiming  that  life  should  not  retain 

The  luxury  of  another  laugh. 

The  first  act  of  the  play  will  show 

The  owner  of  the  theatre 

Conversing  with  the  ghost  of  a  woman. 

As  unresponsive  as  stone 

Solidly  repelling  a  spectral  world, 

His  words  will  keenly  betray 

The  bloodless  control  of  his  features. 

He  will  say:   "  With  slightly  lowered  shoulders, 

Because  of  a  knife  sticking  in  my  back, 

I  shall  trifle  with  crowded  highways, 

Buying  decorations 

For  an  interrupted  bridal-party. 

This  process  will  be  unimportant 

To  the  workshop  of  my  mind 

Where  love  and  death  are  only 

Colourless  problems  upon  a  chart." 

The  ghost  of  the  woman  will  say: 

"  Your  mind  is  but  the  rebellious  servant 

Of  sensitive  emotions 

[57] 


And  brings  them  clearer  dominance." 
And  what  shall  I  mournfully  answer? 
I  am  strangling  emotions 
And  casting  them  into  the  seats 
Of  an  empty  theatre. 


[58] 


PRONOUNCED    FANTASY 

A  NEGRO  girl  with  skin 
As  black  as  a  psychic  threat, 
And  plentiful  swells  of  blonde  hair, 
Sat  at  a  badly  tuned  piano 
And  vanquished  her  fingers  upon  the  keys. 
A  midnight  exultation 
Fastened  itself  on  her  face, 
Quivering  over  the  shrouded  prominence 
Of  her  lips  and  nose. 
Her  dress  was  pink  and  short, 
And  hung  upon  her  tall,  thin  body, 
Like  a  lesson  in  buffoonery. 
She  lectured  her  heart  on  the  piano 
With  violence  of  minor  chords. 
Her  voice  was  a  prisoner 

Whose  strong  hands  turned  the  bars  of  his  cell 
Into  musical  strings. 
Wen'  tuh  Houston,  tuh  get  mah  trunk, 
Did'n  get  mah  trunk,  but  ah  got  dam'  drunk. 
Well,  ahm  satisfi-i-ied 
Cause  ah  gotta  be-e-e-ee. 
The  negro  girl  turned  and  cursed 
With  religious  incision 
At  a  parrot  in  a  white  spittoon. 
He  pampered  his  derision 
While  she  played  another  tune. 
Then  he  saw  her  long  blonde  hair 
And  paused  in  the  midst  of  his  squawk. 


[59] 


II 

1  FOUND  the  negro  girl 

Walking  down  a  railroad  track. 

The  unconscious  humour  of  sunlight 

Disputed  the  gloom  of  her  skin. 

Her  gray  and  dirty  clothes 

Disgraced  the  haste  of  her  body. 

Her  feet  and  arms  were  bare 

And  thin  as  sensual  disappointments. 

An  egg  stood  straight  upon 

The  blonde  attention  of  her  hair. 

The  upturned  remonstrance  of  her  head 

Revealed  her  balancing  effort. 

Lacking  a  more  intense  food 

She  dined  upon  the  air 

And  sang  with  loosened  despair. 

Gonna  lay  mah  head  right  down  upon  dat  — 

Down  upon  dat  railroad  track! 

Gonna  rest  mah  head  right  down  upon  dat  railroad  track. 

An'  wen  the  train  goes  by  —  'm  boy  — 

A  km  gonna  snatch  it  back. 

The  negro  girl  received  my  gaze 
And  broke  it  on  her  poignant  face. 
"  Why  do  you  carry  the  egg?  "  I  said. 
"  If  I  could  only  hate  it  less 
I  might  break  it,  and  undress," 
She  answered  with  motionless  lips. 


[60] 


WHEN  SPIRITS   SPEAK   OF   LIFE 

THREE  spirits  sit  upon  a  low  stone  wall  placed 
on  the  top  of  a  hill.     Their  figures  are  gray,  with 
human  outlines,  and  their  faces  are  those  of  a  boy, 
a  woman,  and  an  old  man.     Light  is  greeting  intimations 
of  evening.     The  wall,  the  hill,  and  the  figures  exist  only 
to  the  spirits  who  have  created  them. 

First  Spirit 

We  have  made  a  wall 
And  take  it  gravely. 

Second  Spirit 

The  pensive  vagary 
That  led  us  to  return  to  earth 
Welcomes  these  pretty  illusions. 
Stone  wall,  hill,  and  evening 
Become  the  touch  of  spice 
Precious  to  our  weariness. 

Third  Spirit 

The  animated  brevity 

Of  this  world  is  captivating! 

We  have  journeyed  inward 

To  the  ever-distant  center  of  life, 

Where  language  is  a  universe 

Seething  with  variations, 

And  form  becomes  the  changing  warmth 

Of  wrestling  influences; 

Where  motion  is  the  plunging  light  of  thoughts 

Dying  upon  each  other. 

First  Spirit 

We  find  an  incredulous  pleasure 
In  changing  from  violent  influences 

[61] 


To  breath  that  is  mutilated  with  outlines. 

With  a  subtle  suspicion,  we  greet 

The  tiny  fables  of  our  hands  and  feet. 

We  take  the  little  blindness  of  eyes 

To  reassure  ourselves 

That  the  fables  will  not  vanish. 

Humorously  we  trade 

Languages,  like  one  who  gives  a  plateau 

For  a  drop  of  old  liquor! 

Second  Spirit 

Once  we  were  germs  of  thought 

Squirming  under  elastic  disguises  — 

The  bank-clerk  inscribing  tombstones; 

The  poet  playing  surgeon  to  his  heart; 

The  cardinal  starving  his  flesh. 

Our  bodies  were  images  made  by  thought 

And  symbolizing  the  pain  of  its  birth. 

Murder,  love,  and  theft 

Were  only  struggling  experiments 

Made  by  germs  of  thought  emerging  to  form. 

Third  Spirit 

What  men  call  mysticism 
Is  the  lull  in  which  their  germ 
Of  thought  compensates  itself 
By  dreaming  of  a  future  form. 
But  when  the  struggle  is  resumed, 
It  often  derides  its  inactivity, 
Scorning  the  brilliant  trance  of  its  exhaustion! 

First  Spirit 

And  now,  three  tired  spirits, 
Seeking  a  weird  trinket  of  the  past, 
Have  slipped  into  a  replica  of  birth. 

[62] 


Second  Spirit 

Because  the  gliding  search  of  our  life 
Is  lacking  in  one  quality,  amusement, 
We  shall  often  return 
To  evenings,  men,  and  walls  of  stone. 


[63] 


INSANITY 

GEROID  LATOUR  was  a  lean,  grandiose  French 
man  whose  curly  beard  resembled  a  cluster  of  ripe 
raspberries.  His  lips  were  maroon-colored  and 
slightly  distended,  as  though  forever  slyly  inviting  some 
stubbornly  inarticulate  thought  —  as  though  slyly  in 
viting  Geroid  La  tour.  A  man's  lips  and  beard  are  two- 
thirds  of  his  being,  unless  he  is  an  anchorite,  and  even  in 
that  case  they  can  become  impressively  stunted.  Geroid 
Latour  was  an  angel  rolling  in  red  mud.  From  much 
rolling  he  had  acquired  the  pert,  raspberry  beard,  strug 
gling  lips,  and  the  surreptitious  grandeur  of  a  nose,  but 
the  plastic  grin  of  a  singed  angel  sometimes  listened  to 
his  face. 

His  wife,  having  futilely  tried  to  wrench  his  beard  off, 
sought  to  reach  his  eyes  with  a  hat-pin. 

"  This  is  unnecessary,"  he  expostulated.  "  Another 
woman  once  did  it  much  better  with  a  word." 

A  plum-colored  parrot  in  the  room  shrieked :  "  I  am 
dumb!  I  am  dumb!  "  Geroid  Latour  had  painted  it 
once,  in  a  sober  moment.  Geroid  and  his  wife  wept 
over  the  parrot;  slapped  each  other  regretfully;  and  sat 
down  to  eat  a  pear.  A  little  girl  ran  into  the  room.  Her 
face  was  like  a  candied  moon. 

"  My  mother  has  died  and  my  father  wants  a  coffin," 
she  said. 

Geroid  Latour  rubbed  his  hands  into  a  perpendicular 
lustre  —  he  was  a  facetiously  candid  undertaker.  He 
took  the  hand  of  the  little  girl  whose  face  was  like  a 
candied  moon  and  they  ambled  down  the  street. 

"  I  have  lost  my  friendship  with  gutters,"  mused 
Geroid,  looking  down  as  he  walked.  "  They  quarrel 
with  bits  of  orange  peel  and  pins.  Patiently  they  wait 
for  the  red  rain  that  men  give  them  every  two  hundred 

[64] 


years.  Brown  and  red  always  sweep  toward  each  other. 
Men  are  often  unknowingly  killed  by  these  two  huge 
colours  treading  the  insects  upon  a  path  and  walking  to 
an  ultimate  trysting-place. 

The  little  girl  whose  face  was  like  a  molasses  crescent 
cut  off  one  of  her  yellow  curls  and  hung  it  from  her  closed 
mouth. 

"  Why  are  you  acting  in  this  way?  "  asked  Geroid. 

"  It's  something  I've  never  done  before/'  she  answered 
placidly. 

Geroid  stroked  his  raspberry  beard  with  menacing 
longing  but  could  not  quite  induce  himself  to  pull  it  off. 
It  would  have  been  like  cutting  the  throat  of  his 
mistress. 

They  passed  an  insincerely  littered  courtyard,  tame 
beneath  its  gray  tatters,  and  saw  a  black  cat  chasing  a 
yellow  cat. 

"  A  cat  never  eats  a  cat  —  goldfish  and  dead  lions 
are  more  to  his  taste,"  said  Geroid.  "Indulgently  he 
flees  from  other  cats  or  pursues  them  in  turn." 

"  I  see  that  you  dislike  melodrama,"  observed  a  bulbous 
woman  in  penitent  lavender,  who  was  beating  a  carpet  in 
the  courtyard. 

"  You're  mistaken.  Melodrama  is  a  weirdly  drunken 
plausibility  and  can  not  sincerely  be  disliked,"  said 
Geroid.  "But  I  must  not  leave  without  complimenting 
your  lavender  wrapper.  Few  people  have  mastered  the 
art  of  being  profoundly  ridiculous." 

"  I  can  see  that  you're  trying  to  be  ridiculously  pro 
found,"  said  the  woman  as  she  threw  a  bucket  of  stale 
water  at  Geroid.  He  fled  down  the  street,  dragging  the 
child  with  him.  They  left  the  cumbersome  sterility  of 
the  city  behind  them  and  passed  into  the  suburbs. 

"  Here  we  have  a  tragedy  in  shades  of  naked  inertness," 
said  Geroid  to  the  little  girl. 

[65] 


"  I  don't  quite  understand  you,"  answered  the  little 
girl.  "  I  see  nothing  but  scowls  and  brownness." 

A  tree  stood  out  like  the  black  veins  on  an  unseen 
fist.  A  square  house  raised  its  toothless  snarl  and  all 
the  other  houses  were  jealous  imitators.  Wooden  fences 
crossed  each  other  with  dejected,  mathematical  precision. 
A  rat  underneath  a  veranda  scuffled  with  an  empty 
candy  box.  The  green  of  dried  grasses  spread  out  like 
poisonous  impotence. 

"  Here  is  the  house  where  my  mother  lies  dead,"  said 
the  little  girl. 

Her  father  —  peace  germinating  into  greasy  overalls  — 
came  down  the  steps.  His  blue  eyes  were  parodies  on 
the  sky  —  discs  of  sinisterly  humourous  blue;  his  face 
reminded  one  of  a  pear  that  had  been  stepped  on  — 
resiliently  flattened. 

"  I  have  come  to  measure  your  wife  for  her  coffin," 
said  Geroid  Latour. 

"  You'll  find  her  at  the  bottom  of  the  well  in  the  back 
yard,"  answered  the  man. 

"  Trying  to  cheat  a  poor  old  undertaker  out  of  his 
business!  "  said  Latour,  waggishly. 

"  No,  I'll  leave  that  to  death,"  said  the  man.  "  Come 
inside  and  warm  your  candour." 

"  No,  thank  you,  shrieks  travel  faster  through  the  open 
air,"  said  Geroid,  squinting  at  the  man's  sportively 
cerulean  eyes. 

"  Come  out  to  the  well  and  we'll  haul  her  up,"  said 
the  man. 

The  little  girl  darted  into  the  house,  like  a  dis 
appointed  hobgoblin,  and  Geroid  Latour  followed  the 
man  to  the  well  at  the  rear  of  the  house.  Suddenly  he  saw 
a  mountainous  washerwoman  dancing  on  her  toes  over 
the  black  loam.  Her  sparse  grayish  black  hair  flapped 
behind  her  like  a  dishrag  and  her  naked  body  had  the 

[66] 


color  of  trampled  snow.  An  empty  beer-bottle  was 
balanced  on  her  head.  She  had  the  face  of  an  old 
Columbine  who  still  thought  herself  beautiful. 

"  A  neighbour  of  mine,"  said  the  man  in  an  awed  voice. 
"  She  was  a  ballet-dancer  in  her  youth  and  every  midnight 
she  makes  my  back-yard  a  theater.  In  the  morning  she 
scrubs  my  floors.  Here,  in  my  back-yard,  she  chases 
the  phantoms  of  her  former  triumphs.  Moonlight  turns 
her  knee  joints  into  miracles!  " 

"  Ah,  from  enormous  wildness  and  pretence,  squeezed 
together,  comes  the  little  drop  of  happiness/'  said 
Geroid  Latour,  sentimentally. 

"  My  wife  objected  to  my  joining  this  woman's  mid 
night  dance,"  said  the  man.  "  To  prevent  her  from  in 
forming  the  police,  I  killed  her.  I  could  not  see  a  miracle 
ruined." 

"  Only  the  insane  are  entertaining,"  answered  Geroid. 
"  The  egoism  of  sane  people  is  gruesome  —  a  modulated 
scale  of  complacent  gaieties  —  but  insane  people  often 
display  an  artificial  ego  which  is  divine.  The  artist, 
gracefully  gesticulating  about  himself,  on  his  divan,  is 
hideous,  but  if  he  danced  on  a  boulder  and  waved  a  lilac 
bough  in  one  hand  and  a  broom  in  the  other,  one  could 
respect  him." 

As  Geroid  finished  talking  the  mountainous  washer 
woman  drew  nearer  and  stopped  in  front  of  the  man. 
Blossoming  glints  of  water  dropped  from  her  grayish 
white  skin. 

"  You  haven't  killed  me  yet,  my  dear  husband,"  she 
shouted  to  the  man.  Then,  snatching  the  beer-bottle 
balanced  on  her  head  she  struck  at  him.  Geroid  fled  to 
the  front  gate  and  sped  down  the  road.  Looking  back, 
from  a  safe  distance,  he  saw  the  mountainous  woman, 
the  man,  and  the  little  child  earnestly  gesticulating  in  the 
moonlight. 

[67] 


POETRY 

MORNING  light  anxiously  pinched  the  cheeks  of 
these  poplar  trees.  The  silver  blood  rushed  to 
their  faces  and  they  blushed.  The  garden 
walls  forgot  their  stolidity  for  a  moment  and  seemed 
inclined  to  leap  away,  but  became  sober  again,  resisting 
the  twinkling  trickery  of  morning  light.  Airily  suspended 
tales  in  light  and  colour,  of  no  importance  to  philosophers, 
hung  over  the  scene.  Only  a  snail  underneath  the  trees, 
steeped  in  a  creeping  evening,  lived  apart  from  the  crisp 
medley  of  morning  lights.  Laboriously,  the  snail  moved 
through  his  explanation  of  the  universe.  But,  to  blades 
of  grass,  their  lives  tersely  centered  in  green,  the  morning 
was  a  mysterious  pressure. 

The  morning  glowed  over  the  garden  like  an  incoherent 
rhapsody.  It  lacked  order  and  thought,  and  the  serious 
eyes  of  teachers  and  jesters  would  have  spurned  it.  But 
Halfert  Bolin,  walking  between  rows  of  cold  peonies, 
regarded  the  morning  with  harsh  approval  and  spoke. 

"  You  have  the  brightness  and  flatness  of  a  distracted 
virgin  but  your  eyes  are  mildly  opaque.  The  tinseled 
swiftness  of  a  courtesan's  memoirs  is  yours  but  your  heart 
is  as  shy  as  the  clink  of  glass.  You  glow  like  an  inco 
herent  rhapsody  over  the  peonies  in  this  garden!  " 

A  woman  whose  painted  face  was  a  lurid  snarl  tapped 
Bolin  on  the  shoulder.  Her  red  hair  was  brushed  upward 
into  a  pinnacle  of  burnished  frenzy;  her  blue  serge  dress 
cast  its  plaintive  monotone  over  the  body  of  a  sagging 
amazon;  a  pink  straw  hat  dangled  from  her  hand.  Bolin 
allowed  his  admiration  to  bow. 

"  A  babyish  lisp  slipping  from  you  would  make  your 
grewsomeness  perfect,  madame,"  he  said. 

"  I  don't  getcha,  friend,"  she  responded.  "  I'm  a 
sporting  lady  from  the  roadhouse  down  the  way  an'  I'm 

[68] 


out  for  a  morning  walk.  Who  planted  you  here,  old 
duck?  " 

"  I'm  a  cow  browsing  amidst  the  peonies,"  said  Bolin 
seriously.  "  Without  a  thought,  I  feed  on  light  and 
colour." 

"  You  don't  look  like  a  cow,"  said  the  woman,  dubi 
ously.  "  Maybe  you're  spoofing  me,  you  funny  old 
turnip!  " 

"  No,  I  only  jest  with  the  morning,"  Bolin  answered, 
unperturbed.  "  It  ignores  me  with  soaring  colours  and  I 
prefer  this  to  the  minute  antagonisms  of  human  beings. 
You  don't  understand  a  word  I  say  —  you  bend  beneath 
tepid  apprehension,  so  I  find  a  pleasure  in  speaking  to 
you  —  its  like  humming  a  love-song  to  a  mud-turtle." 

"  Don't  get  insultin', "  said  the  woman  with  dis 
gruntled  amazement.  "  I  think  you're  crazy." 

Bolin  turned,  with  a  smile  like  a  distant  spark,  and 
walked  away  between  the  peonies.  The  woman  regarded 
him  a  moment,  while  a  fascinated  frown  battled  with  her 
painted  face.  Then  she  strode  after  him  and  gripped 
his  arm. 

"  Hey,  watcha  leavin'  me  for?  "  she  said  in  a  piteously 
strident  voice. 

"  For  the  peonies  in  this  garden,"  answered  Bolin, 
mildly. 

"  Listen,  don't  get  mad  at  me,"  she  said.  "  I  don't 
care  whether  you're  crazy  or  not.  I  like  your  face." 

Bolin  gazed  at  her  while  sorrow  loosened  his  face  and 
made  it  glisten  spaciously. 

"  Can  you  become  as  spontaneously  tranquil  as  these 
peonies?  "  he  asked. 

The  woman  tendered  him  her  dazed  frown,  like  an 
anxious  servant. 

"Walk  with  me  and  be  quiet  unless  I  ask  you  to 
speak,"  said  Bolin  with  sudden  harshness. 

Obediently  she  laid  a  hand  on  his  arm  and  they  strolled 

[69] 


down  the  path  between  the  peonies.  She  sidled  along 
like  an  inspired  puppet  —  she  seemed  a  doll  touched  to 
life  by  some  Christ.  Upon  her  painted  face  a  nun  and  a 
violinist  grappled  tentatively  and  her  lips  made  a  red 
scarf  fallen  from  the  struggle.  Bolin  left  the  peonies  and 
wandered  down  the  road.  They  came  upon  a  boulder 
clad  in  an  outline  of  smashed  spears.  Queen  Anne's  Lace 
grew  close  to  its  base,  like  the  remnants  of  some  revel. 

"  This  is  the  head  of  a  philosopher,"  said  Bolin. 

The  woman  jerkily  turned  her  body,  while  pallid 
perplexity  ate  into  her  paint  and  made  her  face  narrow. 

"  You  can  speak/'  said  Bolin. 

"  It  looks  like  a  rock,"  she  answered  in  the  voice  of  a 
child  clinking  his  fetters. 

"  We  have  both  spoken  words,"  said  Bolin  mildly. 

The  shy  blindness  on  her  face  glided  to  and  fro,  like  a 
prisoner.  As  she  strolled  with  Bolin  she  still  seemed 
a  puppet  dragged  along  the  dust  of  a  road  by  some  Christ. 
Bolin's  middle-aged  face  whistled,  with  limpid  chagrin, 
to  his  youth.  His  high  cheek-bones  were  like  hidden 
fists  straining  against  his  sallow  skin. 

They  came  upon  a  dead  rabbit  stiffening  by  the 
roadside. 

"  Bury  him,"  said  Bolin,  gravely. 

The  woman  clutched  at  her  habitual  self. 

"  S-a-a-y,  what's  the  idea?  "  she  asked  in  a  shrilly 
lengthened  voice. 

"  Bury  him,"  repeated  Bolin  gravely. 

With  a  dazed  giggle  she  picked  a  dead  branch  from  the 
ground  and  jabbed  at  the  loose  black  loam.  Then  she 
gingerly  prodded  the  dead  rabbit  with  the  branch, 
shoving  it  into  the  depression  she  had  made.  She  scooped 
earth  over  it  with  her  foot. 

"  Now  we're  both  crazy,"  she  said  uncertainly,  and  her 
nervous  smile  was  the  juggled  wreck  of  a  silver  helmet. 

[70] 


"  You  have  buried  your  meekness,"  said  Bolin,  calmly 
amused.  "  Now  walk  beside  me  and  do  not  speak  unless, 
being  brave,  you  desire  to  leave  me." 

The  woman  stood  gaping  at  him,  like  a  vision  poign 
antly  doubting  the  magician  who  has  created  it.  Sul- 
lenness  made  her  lips  straight  for  a  moment,  then  faded 
into  twitching  awe.  She  slid  her  arm  into  his  and  once 
more  seemed  a  doll  dragged  along  the  dust  of  a  road  by 
some  distracted  giant.  Bolin  retraced  his  steps;  he  and 
the  woman  passed  by  the  garden  of  cold  peonies  and 
came  to  a  bend  in  the  road.  Late  afternoon  blundered 
sedately  through  shades  of  green  foliage  beneath  them. 
Below  the  hilltop  on  which  they  stood,  a  barn-like  house 
crouched,  its  tan  cerements  repelling  the  afternoon  light. 

The  woman  tapped  her  chin  with  two  fingers  in  a 
drum-beat  of  reality. 

"  Gotta  get  back  to  work,  old  dear,"  she  said,  amiably 
squinting  at  Bolin. 

Bolin's  sallow  face  shook  once  and  became  chiseled 
apathy. 

"  So  do  I,"  he  answered,  his  voice  like  the  accidental 
ring  of  light  metals.  "I'm  the  new  waiter  Foley  hired 
last  week.  You've  been  too  busy  to  notice  me  much." 

For  a  full  minute  the  woman  stood  staring  at  him,  her 
hands  upon  her  hips,  her  slightly  bulging  gray  eyes  like 
water-drops  threatening  to  roll  down  her  shattered  face. 

"  You're  the  guy  they  call  Nutty  Louie,"  she  said  at 
last,  as  though  confiding  a  ludicrously  startling  message 
to  herself. 

Then  for  another  full  minute  she  stood  staring  at  him. 

"  We're  bughouse,"  she  said  in  a  mesmerised  whisper. 
"  Bughouse." 

Bolin  walked  forward  without  a  word.  The  woman 
gaped  at  him  for  a  moment  and  then  ran  after  him  as 
she  had  in  the  garden  of  peonies. 

[71] 


RELIGION 

A^VIN  TOR  sat  in  his  floating  row-boat  and  read 
the  Bible.  Green  waves  died  upon  each  other,  like 
a  cohesive  fantasy.  Each  small  wave  rose  as  high 
as  the  other  and  ended  in  a  swan's  neck  of  white  inter 
rogation.  Sunlight  blinded  the  water  as  style  dazes  the 
contents  of  a  poem  and  the  blue  sky  lifted  itself  to 
symmetrical  stupor.  The  air  fell  against  one  like  a 
soothing  religion.  The  bristling  melancholia  of  pine 
trees  lined  the  wide  river.  But  Alvin  Tor  sat  in  his 
floating  row-boat,  reading  the  Bible.  He  read  the  Songs 
of  Solomon,  and  a  sensual  pantomime  made  a  taut  stage 
of  his  face.  When  not  reading  the  Songs  of  Solomon  he 
was  as  staidly  poised  as  a  monk's  folded  arms.  He  had 
borrowed  the  colours  of  his  life  from  that  spectrum  of 
desire  which  he  called  God.  Different  shades  of  green 
leaves  were,  to  him,  the  playful  jealousies  of  a  presence; 
the  tossed  colours  of  birds  became  the  ineffably  light 
gestures  of  a  lost  poet. 

His  Swedish  peasant's  face  had  singed  its  dimples  in 
a  bit  of  sophistication  but  his  eyes  were  undeceived.  His 
heart  was  a  secluded  soliloquy  transforming  the  shouts 
of  the  world  into  tinkling  surmises.  His  broad  nose  and 
long  lips  were  always  at  ease  and  his  ruddy  skin  held 
the  texture  of  fresh  bunting.  His  eyes  knew  the  un- 
kindled  reticence  of  a  rustic  boy. 

This  man  of  one  mood  sat  in  his  floating  row-boat, 
reading  the  Bible.  He  reached  the  mouth  of  the  river 
and  drifted  out  to  sea.  The  sea  was  a  menacing  lethargy 
of  rhythm:  green  swells  sensed  his  row-boat  with  drama 
tic  leisure.  A  sea  gull  skimmed  over  the  water,  like  a 
haphazard  adventure.  Looking  up  from  his  Bible  Alvin 
Tor  saw  the  body  of  a  woman  floating  beside  his  boat. 
With  one  jerk  his  face  swerved  into  blankness.  The  tip 

[72] 


of  his  tongue  met  his  upper  lip  as  though  it  were  a  fading 
rim  of  reality.  The  fingers  of  one  hand  distressed  his 
flaxen  hair. 

The  woman  floated  on  her  back  with  infinite  abandon. 
Little  ripples  of  green  water  died  fondling  her  body. 
The  green  swells  barely  lifting  her  were  great  rhythms 
disturbed  by  an  inert  discord.  Sunlight,  fumbling  at  her 
body,  relinquished  its  promiscuous  desires  and  became 
abashed.  Her  wet  brown  hair  had  a  drugged  gentility, 
its  short  dark  curls  hugged  her  head  with  despondent 
understanding.  Her  face  had  been  washed  to  an  imper 
turbable  transparency:  it  had  the  whiteness  of  reclining 
foam  overcast  with  a  twinge  of  green  —  the  sea  had  lent 
her  its  skin.  Her  eyes  were  limply  unworried  and  vio 
lated  to  gray  disintegration.  In  separated  bits  of  outlines 
the  remains  of  thinly  impudent  features  were  slipping 
from  her  face.  The  bloated  pity  of  black  and  white 
garments  hid  her  lean  body. 

As  Alvin  Tor  watched  her,  tendrils  of  peace  gradually 
interfered  with  the  blankness  on  his  face.  His  lips  sus 
tained  an  unpremediated  repose.  A  sensitive  compassion 
dropped  the  sparks  of  its  coming  into  his  eyes.  His 
clothes  became  a  jest  upon  an  inhuman  body;  the  earth 
of  him  effortlessly  transcended  itself  in  the  gesture  of  his 
arm  flung  out  to  the  woman. 

"  Impalpable  relic  of  a  soul,  the  spirit  you  held  must 
have  severed  its  shadow  to  preserve  you  forever  from  the 
waves,"  he  said,  his  face  blindfolded  with  ectasy,  "  for 
you  grasp  the  water  with  immortal  relaxation.  You  are 
not  a  body  —  you  are  beauty  receding  into  a  resistless 
seclusion." 

"  Kind  fool,  musically  stifling  himself  in  a  row-boat  — 
made  kind  by  the  desperate  tenderness  of  a  lie  —  you 
are  seranading  the  chopped  bodies  of  your  emotions," 
said  the  woman. 

[73] 


Alvin  Tor's  face  cracked  apart  and  the  incredulously 
hurrying  ghost  of  a  child  nodded  a  moment  and  was 
snuffed  out. 

"  Mermaid  of  haunting  despondency,  what  are  you?  " 
he  asked. 

"I  am  the  symbol  of  your  emotions,"  the  woman 
answered. 

"  I  made  them  roses  stepped  upon  by  God/'  said 
Alvin  Tor. 

"  I  am  the  symbol  of  your  emotions,"  said  the  woman. 

Alvin  Tor  heavily  dropped  his  raised  arm,  like  a  man 
smashing  a  trumpet.  Restless  white  hands  compressed 
the  ruddy  broadness  of  his  face.  The  woman  slid  into 
the  green  swells  like  exhausted  magic.  Alvin  Tor  rowed 
back  to  the  river. 

II 

WOMAN  lifted  the  green  window-shades  in  her 
room  and  resentfully  blinked  at  the  sun-plastered  clam 
ours  of  a  street.  She  turned  to  the  bed  upon  which 
another  woman  reclined. 

"  Say,  wasn't  that  a  nutty  drunk  we  had  last  night?" 
she  said.  "  Huggin'  a  Bible  and  ravin'  about  waves  and 
mermaids  and  a  lot  of  funny  stuff!  " 

She  dropped  the  green  shade  and  stood  against  it  a 
moment  in  the  smouldering  gloom  of  the  room.  Her 
brown  hair  had  a  drugged  gentility:  its  short  dark  curls 
hugged  her  head  with  despondent  understanding.  Her 
face  had  been  washed  to  an  imperturbable  transparency: 
it  had  the  whiteness  of  reclining  foam  overcast  with  d 
twinge  of  green  —  the  sea  had  lent  her  its  skin. 


[74] 


SCIENTIFIC    PHILOSOPHY 

THE  concentrated  vehemence  of  a  mountain  halted 
against  the  sky  in  a  thin  line  of  thwarted  hostility. 
A  waterfall  hurdled  its  crazed  parabola  between 
gray  rocks,  flying  into  a  stifled  scream  of  motion  far 
below.  When  the  pine  trees  moved  a  mathematician 
solved  his  problems,  and  his  acrid  exultation  hypnotized 
the  air.  The  pungent  truculence  of  earth  that  had  never 
been  stepped  on  raised  its  brown  shades. 

Eric  Lane  stopped  in  an  alcove  of  pine  trees;  lifted  a 
pack  from  his  back;  pitched  his  tent;  and  broke  dead  pine 
branches  across  his  knee.  There  were  scars  on  his  face 
where  philosophies  had  broken  and  died  and  the  beaming 
redundancy  of  one  that  survived.  For  Eric  believed  that 
the  visible  and  audible  surface  of  man's  conduct  and 
dreams,  when  interpreted  and  compared,  could  reveal  his 
frustrated  hungers.  Metaphysics,  to  him,  was  a  beggar 
rattling  his  chains  into  insincere  victories  of  sound  —  a 
beggar  painting  seraphs  upon  the  strained  finality  of  his 
brain. 

Eric  looked  up  from  his  task  of  breaking  dead  pine 
branches.  A  first  shade  of  twilight  climbed  the  moun 
tain,  like  a  dazed  negro  runner.  The  mountain  impas 
sively  confessed  that  its  vehemence  had  been  a  lie.  It 
met  the  sky  with  an  immense  line  of  collapsed  reticence. 
The  waterfall  became  the  squirming  of  a  white  hermit 
who  finds  a  black  stranger  invading  his  cell.  Twilight 
was  a  body  gradually  returning  to  the  festooned  skeletons 
of  the  pine  trees.  The  rocks  were  enticed  into  atti 
tudes  —  one  was  a  giant  fondling  the  spear  that  had 
wounded  him;  another  curved  over  like  a  gray  serf  who 
had  broken  his  back.  Eric  stared  at  a  huge  rock  stand 
ing  on  the  mountainside  and  outlined  against  the  distant 
base  of  a  second  mountain.  It  held  the  tensely  em- 

[75] 


balmed  profile  of  a  woman.  Her  rigidly  woebegone 
features  had  withdrawn  from  some  devil's  cliff  of  desire; 
they  made  a  line  of  incomplete  crucifixion.  Her  hidden 
eyes  germinated  into  ghouls  stealthily  absorbing  the  gray 
harvest  of  her  face.  Designed  by  a  shattered  surmise 
her  face  retreated  from  the  valley.  Her  forehead  was 
like  a  sword  cracked  in  the  middle;  her  nose  and  lips 
were  the  remains  of  an  autopsy  on  emotion.  Demons 
and  virgins  had  gained  one  grave  in  the  grayness  assail 
ing  her  face. 

Eric  regarded  her  at  first  with  a  celebrating  scepticism; 
then  sallowness  slowly  marked  his  face  into  a  hanging 
scroll  of  terror.  Lightness  vanished  from  his  black  hair 
and  it  became  a  charred  crown.  He  tottered  three  steps 
in  the  direction  of  the  rock-face  and  then,  with  unan 
nounced  dexterity,  a  smile  revived  his  face.  The  diminu 
tive  city  of  his  mind  had  sent  its  lord-mayor  to  restore 
him.  Eric  returned  to  his  task  of  breaking  dead  pine 
branches.  The  diminutive  city  of  his  mind  sent  slender 
paeans  into  electric  threads.  Eric  kindled  the  branches 
into  a  fire,  and  a  carnival  of  flames  pirouetted  into 
startled  death.  Eric  stretched  his  arms  out,  like  a  concu 
bine  stroking  the  walls  of  her  black  tent,  and  his  face 
became  idly  immobile.  Then  he  altered  completely,  in 
the  leap  of  a  moment,  as  though  slipping  from  a  loose  cos 
tume  with  infinite  ease.  His  face  stiffened  into  the  un 
earthly  equilibrium  of  thought  witnessing  the  torture  of 
emotion.  The  fire,  to  him;  became  a  gaudy  funeral-pyre. 
When  sleep  finally  interfered  with  his  face  he  dropped 
slowly  to  the  ground,  like  satiated  revenge. 

When  he  awoke,  morning  assaulted  the  gaunt  scene 
with  unceremonious  clarity.  The  mountain  became  a 
senseless  giant;  the  waterfall  changed  to  a  commonplace 
ribbon:  and  the  pine  trees  blended  into  the  lethargy  of 
dwarfs.  The  gray  rock  on  the  mountain  was  still  gashed 

[76] 


into  the  face  of  a  woman  but  her  outlines  were  those  of  a 
transfigured  virago.  Eric  strapped  on  his  pack;  gazed 
down  at  the  rock,  with  the  smile  of  a  merchant  emerging 
from  drunken  memories,  and  strode  toward  it.  When  he 
reached  it  he  hammered  away  a  flat  fragment,  for  remem 
brance,  and  returned  to  the  mountain  path,  with  an  ex 
pressionless  face. 


Eric  Lane  ended  his  lecture  on  scientific  philosophy 
and  tapped  a  desecrating  hand,  for  a  moment,  on  the 
profile  that  had  told  me  a  story  during  his  talk.  He  had 
left  the  mountain  pass  but  he  was  unaware  of  that.  He 
would  have  laughed  at  the  idea,  like  a  beggar  who  rattles 
his  chains  into  insincere  victories  of  sound.  Of  that,  too, 
he  was  unaware. 


[77] 


ART 

MRS.  CALVIN  and  Mrs.  Kildrick  stood  on  oppo 
site  sides  of  a  back-yard  fence.  Around  them 
the  romping  improbabilities  of  early  spring 
were  dispersed  amidst  the  sour  reality  of  suburban 
houses.  Pale  green  surrounded  the  small,  square  abodes, 
like  an  impish  irrelevance.  Each  house  carried  a  shade 
of  dull  green,  brown  and  red,  and  these  shades  fitted  into 
each  other  and  made  a  meekly  repressed  story.  Cinder 
side-walks  stretched  in  front  of  the  houses  —  remorse 
fully  dry  remains  of  fire,  sacrificing  themselves  to  occa 
sional  feet.  The  entire  scene  was  an  unconscious  reflec 
tion  of  the  minds  of  Mrs.  Calvin  and  Mrs.  Kildrick, 
standing  on  opposite  sides  of  a  back-yard  fence. 

These  women  held  an  unblossoming  stoutness,  like 
buds  that  had  swollen  enormously  but  failed  to  open. 
Their  gray  muslin  wrappers  were  too  undistinguished 
to  be  shrouds  and  sepulchrally  flirted  with  red  ruffles. 
Mrs.  Calvin  had  an  implacably  round  face  and  it  re 
minded  one  of  a  merchant  scolding  an  infant.  Mrs.  Kil- 
drick's  face  was  round,  but  softer,  like  that  of  a  frus 
trated  milk-maid. 

"  You  ought  to  see  her  room,"  said  Mrs.  Kildrick. 
"  It  looks  like  a  drunkard's  confession,  as  my  husband 
says,  "  the  funniest  clay  riggers  and  pain  tins  you  ever 
saw." 

"  I  couldn't  believe  it  when  you  told  me,"  said  Mrs. 
Calvin,  "  the  poor  dear  looks  so-o  respectable  —  what 
can  be  ailing  her?  " 

"  She  calls  it  her  a-art,"  said  Mrs.  Kildrick.  "  Well, 
as  my  husband  does  say,  we  should  pity  those  whose 
minds  are  a  little  bit  cracked!  " 

The  ladies  continued  to  adulterate  the  wanness  of  their 
doubts  and  the  sunlight  continued  its  blunt  rummaging 


way  among  the  rubbish-cans  and  fences.  The  afternoon 
jovially  began  to  change  its  glowing  costume  for  a  pre 
tended  death  scene,  studying  and  lingering  over  gray 
effects.  Just  as  its  melancholy  was  heaving  toward  a 
climax  Helma  Solbert  strode  up  the  cinder  walk  leading 
to  Mrs.  Kildrick's  abode. 

She  was  a  woman  of  thirty  with  a  body  whose  dying 
youth  amply  derided  middle-age.  Her  ovally  impertinent 
face  spoke  to  the  first  warnings  of  dissolution  and  told 
them  that  their  coming  had  been  ill-advised.  Weary  but 
tenaciously  merry,  her  gray  eyes  were  close  to  those  of 
one  who  has  made  the  dagger  in  his  side  a  cajoling  saint. 
Her  little  nose  was  a  straight  invitation  to  her  widely  ripe 
lips  and  they  turned  upward  as  if  to  reach  it.  She  wore 
a  blue  serge  suit  that  was  an  incongruous  commonplace 
but  did  not  quite  succeed  in  effacing  her.  Round  and 
black,  her  small  hat  rested  lightly  upon  her  brown  and 
abundant  hair,  like  an  inconspicuous  accident.  She  en 
tered  her  room,  abandoned  her  hat  and  coat,  and  meas 
ured  herself  in  a  mirror  as  though  encouraging  a  stranger 
to  play  with  his  burden.  Then  a  smile  of  delighted  futil 
ity  plucked  at  her  lips  and  she  closed  her  eyes  to  avoid 
robbing  the  stranger  of  his  forlornly  puzzling  charm. 
With  her  eyes  still  closed  she  walked  to  a  couch  and 
stretched  out  upon  it,  and  everything  vanished  from  her 
face  except  its  flesh.  Framed  canvases  hung  upon  the 
yellow  plaster  walls  of  the  room  and  each  frame  had  a 
shape  that  obviously  failed  to  harmonize  with  the  paint 
ing  it  enclosed.  Unconscious  of  the  stiff  challenges 
holding  them,  the  canvases  stood  in  the  fading  afternoon 
light,  like  a  disconnected  fable.  One  above  the  couch 
represented  a  small  red  apple  split  by  an  enormous  dark 
green  hatchet.  The  hatchet  had  driven  one  of  its  points 
into  a  wooden  table  and  slanted  steeply  upward,  its  slen 
der  handle  rising  to  an  upper  corner  of  the  painting.  Two 

[79] 


little  hemispheres  of  red  and  white  apple  cowered  on 
each  side  of  the  hatchet's  blade.  The  visible,  level  top 
of  the  table  was  dark  brown  and  terminated  against  a 
feebly  violet  background.  The  following  sentimental 
words  were  painted  in  black  letters  high  upon  the  violet. 

"  The  hatchet  struck  at  weak  beauty,  but  —  " 

The  canvas  was  enclosed  by  a  round  frame  painted 
in  a  shade  of  apple  red.  Each  canvas  in  the  room  held 
the  first  line  of  a  poem  that  was  completed  by  the  colored 
forms  of  the  painting  or  a  last  line  preceded  by  visual 
symbols.  With  the  air  of  a  fanatic  whose  blood  had 
tightened  into  loops  of  fire  that  cast  their  sheen  upon  his 
voice,  Helma  would  say  to  rare  visitors  viewing  her 
paintings : 

"  By  blending  into  one,  art,  literature  and  painting  can 
lose  their  deficiencies  and  gain  perfection.  I  am  merely 
experimenting  with  the  crude  promise  of  this  future 
union." 

On  a  canvas  at  the  opposite  side  of  the  room  a  huge 
complexly  broken  arrow  emerged  from  a  pale  red  sky. 
The  black  arrow  pieces  were  dotted  with  tiny  yellow,  in 
digo  and  pink  birds.  Dark  red  lips,  each  twisted  to  a 
different  expression,  stood  in  the  corners  of  the  canvas. 
Extending  down  the  left  side  of  the  painting  the  follow 
ing  line  was  written  in  black  against  a  strip  of  bare 
canvas. 

"  Thus  I  spoke  one  afternoon,  because  - 

Helma  Solbert  rose  from  her  couch,  lit  a  candle  and 
stood  before  the  arrow-framed  painting,  gazing  at  it  with 
a  pierced  and  subtly  colorless  face.  Then  she  turned  on 
an  electric  light  and  its  artificial  stare,  in  an  instant, 
brought  her  an  obliterating  self -consciousness.  With  the 
bearing  of  one  who  impudently  walks  to  a  gruesome  sac 
rifice  she  disappeared  behind  a  lavendar  screen  in  a 
corner  of  the  room  and  fried  her  evening  meal.  When  she 

[so] 


emerged  from  the  screen  her  face  had  once  more  per 
fected  its  defensive  impertinence.  Even  in  her  sleep 
some  hours  later  her  features  retained  the  blurred  sus 
picion  of  a  smile  that  stayed  like  a  lurking  sentinel. 

The  following  morning  she  was  too  ill  to  rise  and  Mrs. 
Kildrick  summoned  a  doctor.  He  was  a  portly  man  with 
a  steeply  florid  face  and  a  dominating  beard  that  had  the 
color  of  wet  sand.  While  he  was  in  the  midst  of  examin 
ing  his  patient  she  rose  to  a  sitting  posture  and  stared  at 
him. 

"  You're  what  I  tried  to  hide  from;  why  have  you 
come  to  plague  me?  "  she  said,  loudly. 


[81] 


MUSIC 

OLGA  CRAWFORD  fiercely  divorced  herself  from 
all  expression  as  she  maltreated  her  violin  at  the 
Symphony  Moving  Picture  Theater.  In  its 
average  moments  of  vivacity  her  face  was  a  dissembling 
friar  who  brightly  listened  to  her  sensual  lips,  but  as  she 
played,  her  face  became  an  emptiness  profaned  by  the 
wail  of  her  instrument.  Her  arms  desecrated  their 
errands  and  her  head  sloped  into  an  unwilling  counterfeit 
of  wakefulness.  On  the  screen  above  her  men  and  women 
frantically  guarded  their  hallucination  of  life  and  a  de 
crepit  plot  vaguely  imitated  love  and  bravery.  Rows  of 
faces  stolidly  massacred  the  gloom  of  the  theater  and 
stood  like  a  regiment  waiting,  without  thought,  for  some 
command.  But  when  one  looked  closer  three  expressions 
broke  from  the  stolidity,  as  three  major  harmonies  might 
charm  the  mind  of  a  composer.  The  first  was  a  somno 
lent  elation  —  the  mien  of  a  hungry  person  dozing  over 
some  crumbs  he  is  almost  too  tired  to  eat.  Shop-girls, 
with  pertly  robbed  faces,  became  victims  of  this  expres 
sion,  although  an  occasional  man  with  lips  like  determined 
fiascoes  also  attained  it.  The  second  was  a  tightly  laced 
impatience  —  the  enmity  of  one  whose  feelings  have  been 
openly  censored.  Fat  women  with  flabbily  throttled 
faces  and  glistening  men  with  bodies  like  bulky  scandals 
received  this  expression.  The  third  was  a  seraphic  stupor 
—  the  demeanour  of  one  whose  formless  delights  have 
benignly  exiled  thought. 

To  Olga  these  people  gathered  into  a  blanched  dupli 
cate  of  life  —  a  remote  comedy  that  made  the  monotone 
of  her  evening  self-conscious.  If  they  had  excoriated 
her  she  could  have  forgotten  them,  but  their  weighty  in 
difference  raped  her  attention.  The  dryly  sinuous  smell 
of  their  clothes  pelted  her  like  a  sandstorm:  the  little, 


desperate  perfumes  they  used  scarcely  survived.  Their 
eyes  were  scores  of  tinily  inviting  bulls-eyes  never  reached 
by  her  hurried  arrows. 

She  finished  her  playing;  the  people  shuffled  out  like  an 
apologetic  delusion.  Ferenz,  the  pianist,  a  cowed  Torea 
dor  of  a  man,  gave  his  browns  and  blacks  a  ponderous 
recreation. 

"  Nother  grind  passed,"  he  said  in  a  thick  voice  cor 
rupted  by  pity.  "  Hand  over  them  sheets,  Joe." 

Joe,  fat  as  a  gourmand's  revery,  handed  him  the  sheets. 
The  features  on  Joe's  face  were  as  abject  as  crumbs  on  a 
shallow  plate.  The  Symphony  Theater  orchestra  flaunted 
its  yawning  moroseness  a  little  while  longer  and  filed 
through  a  low  exit. 

Olga's  feet  tamely  saluted  the  crowded  street-pave 
ments.  To  her  the  crowd  was  an  approach  to  the  theater 
audience  —  a  brisk  indifference  that  made  her  eyes  neg 
lected  spendthrifts.  Its  motion  alone  gave  it  a  flickering 
mastery:  if  it  had  paused,  for  an  hour,  it  would  have  be 
come  inane.  The  choked  tirade  of  rolling  street-cars  and 
automobiles  would  have  ended  in  a  dismal  curtain  of 
silence  —  the  chariots  would  have  changed  to  mere  hard 
ware  puzzled  by  the  moonlight.  A  tall  woman,  encourag 
ing  the  gorgeous  tumult  of  her  dresses,  would  have  stood 
like  a  cluttered  farce.  The  little  pagan  symmetries  of  her 
face,  gaudily  tantalizing  when  merely  glimpsed,  would 
have  met  in  a  kittenish  argument.  A  tall  man,  blondly 
governing  his  polished  discrepancies,  would  have  changed 
to  a  stagnant  buffoon.  An  old  man,  chiding  his  corpulent 
effulgence  with  endearments  of  motion,  would  have 
altered  to  a  maudlin  exaggeration. 

Olga  reached  her  room  and  summoned  the  meaningless 
stare  of  an  electric  light.  Upon  her  short  body  plumpness 
and  slenderness  bargained  with  each  other,  and  the  re 
sult  was  a  suave  arbitration.  Her  dark  green  skirt  and 

[83] 


white  waist  made  a  subdued  affirmation:  their  coloured 
lines  did  not  emphasise  the  lurking  essences  of  her  body. 
Surrounded  by  black  disturbances  of  hair  the  sardonic 
parts  of  her  face  were  molested  by  sentimental  incon 
sistencies.  Her  nose  was  a  salient  inquisition  but  her 
full  mouth  had  a  negroid  flash;  her  chin  was  coldly 
bellicose  but  her  cheeks  were  softly  turned.  Beneath  her 
moderate  brow  her  blue  and  white  eyes  were  related  to 
glaciers. 

She  sat  at  an  upright  piano  and  trifled  with  the  keys, 
almost  inaudibly.  It  was  midnight  and  an  acrimonious 
man  in  the  next  room  often  remonstrated  with  the  wall 
when  her  piano  conversed  too  impulsively.  Since  she  was 
an  unknown  composer  the  moment  is  appropriate  for  an 
attack  upon  her  obscurity.  Her  music  was  the  compact 
Sunday  of  her  life.  There  she  deserted  the  trite  miserli 
ness  of  narrative  and  definite  concepts  and  designed  a 
spacious  holiday.  Her  notes  loafed  and  romped  into 
inquisitive  patterns  and  were  only  intent  upon  shifting 
their  positions.  Thought  and  emotion  presided  over  the 
experimental  revels  of  their  servants  but  issued  no  narrow 
commands  and  became  broadly  festive  guidances.  In 
her  music  the  rules  of  harmony  were  neither  neglected 
nor  worshipped.  When  they  felt  an  immense  friendliness 
for  the  romping  of  her  notes  they  made  a  natural  back 
ground:  otherwise,  they  did  not  intrude.  Her  music 
did  not  strive  to  suggest  or  interpret  concepts  and  pic 
tures  nor  did  it  salaam  to  emotions.  All  three  were 
seconds  rising  and  dying  as  her  sounds  changed  their 
places.  The  first  few  notes  of  each  composition  were 
repeated  above  as  the  title,  not  because  they  dominated 
the  piece,  but  merely  as  a  means  of  identification. 

In  her  wanly  nondescript  room  which  she  did  not  own, 
from  midnight  to  dawn,  this  woman  whose  face  was  a 
bewilderment  of  contrasts,  sat  furnishing  the  momentum 


for  a  reveling  deluge  of  music.  But  an  evening  decided 
to  interrupt  this  performance. 

Olga  stood  in  the  shop  of  a  neighborhood  cobbler.  He 
was  a  frayed  apologia,  with  a  scant  distraction  of  gray 
hair  and  a  dustily  crushed  face. 

"  When  you  play  violin  in  theater  I  have  heard,"  he 
said.  "  Maybe  you  would  like  to  hear  my  boy.  He  is 
only  eleven  but  he  play  almost  so  good  as  you.  Maybe 
you  will  tell  him  how  he  can  play  better.'7 

Olga  followed  him  to  the  rear  of  his  shop,  with  a  sur 
face  purchase  of  pity.  He  trotted  out  his  son,  a  comedy 
in  light  browns  relieved  by  the  smothered  fixity  of  gray 
eyes.  With  whining  precision  the  boy  twisted  his  way 
through  Massenet's  Elegy,  defending  each  sliding  note 
with  his  arms  and  his  head.  The  syrupy  embrace  of  a 
world  stirred  upon  his  acceptant  face;  the  whites  of  his 
eyes  hovered  against  Olga's  face,  like  a  writhing  request. 
In  the  midst  of  his  playing  she  turned  and  fled,  terror- 
stricken,  down  the  street. 


[85] 


ETHICS 

ETHEL  CURN  was  an  acrobat  with  Hearn's  Twelve 
Ring  Circus,  but  her  bones  were  riveted  together 
by  a  precariously  brittle  dignity  as  she  paraded 
down  the  field  of  daisies  to  a  cliff  at  the  edge  of  the 
sea.  Perhaps  acrobats  walk  stiffly  during  their  leisure 
hours  because  their  bodies  become  ascetic  when  released 
from  an  unreal,  sensual  agility.  Ethel  Curn  sometimes 
stooped  to  pick  a  daisy  and  her  body  received  motion 
in  a  deliberately  ungallant  manner,  as  though  greeting 
an  unwelcome  mistress.  Her  face  was  an  indiscreetly 
torn  screen  for  emotions  that  had  been  dead  for  many 
years;  her  low  forehead  broke  into  the  tinily  pointed 
lustres  of  her  features;  her  body  was  as  slim  as  a  sym 
bolised  cricket's  lament.  She  crossed  the  field  of  daisies 
intensely  dissolved  into  a  forethought  of  afternoon  and 
stood  underneath  a  tree  at  the  edge  of  the  cliff.  As  she 
leaned  against  the  tree  it  seemed  as  if  a  giant  had  courte 
ously  lent  his  umbrella  to  a  rudely  unresponsive  dwarf. 
Below  her  the  sea  grunted  with  automatic  fury  and  re 
ceded,  like  a  pleased  actor.  Winds  threw  their  weird 
applause  against  the  blue  and  gray  rocks.  The  calmer  air 
underneath  the  tree  was  not  unlike  a  distressed  mind 
caught  between  the  noises. 

Ethel  Curn  seated  herself  beneath  the  tree  and  read 
a  paper-bound  novel  entitled,  "  The  Fate  of  Eleanor 
Martin,"  but  the  sea  and  the  rocks  interfered  too  effec 
tively  with  Eleanor  and  her  pretended  life  slid  into  the 
reality  at  the  foot  of  the  tree,  while  Ethel  peered  aggres 
sively  down  at  the  waves.  A  whim  winked  its  narcotic 
eye  at  her  mind  —  the  waves  became  fellow- workers 
and  she  was  an  audience  critically  examining  their  turns. 
"A  little  higher  with  that  green  somersault!  Come  on, 
old  chicken,  you  can  do  a  longer  slide  if  you  try!  "  her 

[86] 


mind  cried  amiably.  Lost  in  the  syncopation  of  admira 
tion  her  body  swayed  with  the  waves  and  her  brown 
hair  went  adventuring.  Then,  like  a  jilted  servant, 
her  mood  ran  from  her,  brandishing  its  abashed  haste 
over  her  body.  Sorrow  struck  her  face  with  a  crazily 
gay  second  that  extinguished  her  eyes.  Her  body  im 
provised  its  lines  into  a  wilted  sexlessness  that  made 
her  black  skirt  and  pink  waist  mysterious.  The  torture 
of  a  lost  love  had  feasted  upon  her  flesh  and  reduced 
it  to  an  abstraction.  Hearn,  the  circus-master,  presided 
over  the  feast  like  a  chilly  urbane  magician.  Without 
a  trace  of  sensual  longing  she  recalled  his  little  black 
moustache,  standing  like  a  curt  intrigue  over  his  lips,  and 
the  way  in  which  it  had  bitten  into  her  mouth  became  the 
unreal  memento  of  something  she  had  never  possessed. 
Like  all  women  gazing  back  at  a  departed  love,  she  felt 
a  swindled  poverty  that  could  not  quite  decide  whether 
it  had  once  owned  wealth  or  not.  This  feeling  translated 
itself  in  exclamatory  vowels  that  could  not  find  the  con 
sonants  of  her  past  passion.  She  smiled  like  a  bedraggled, 
masquerading  tragedy.  It  takes  women  years  to  perfect 
this  masquerade,  but  they  win  a  distracted  pleasure 
that  guards  them  from  haggling  memories.  To  generalize 
about  women  is  to  broaden  our  hope  that  one  woman 
may  serve  for  the  rest.  Philosophers  disappointed  in  love 
often  do  this,  though  the  man  on  the  street  is  a  fairly 
adept  mimic.  Ethel  Curn's  bosom  lightly  scolded  her 
pink  waist  and  her  poignantly  devilish  smile  almost  per 
suaded  her  that  it  was  real.  All  the  tragedy  on  her  face 
spent  itself  in  a  distressed  question.  In  unison  with  this 
proceeding  a  perturbed  monologue  within  her  addressed 
her  vanity  which  was  silkily  perched  upon  an  emotional 
balcony. 

"  Hearn  treated  me  white  —  blue  garters  with  a  real 
diamond  in  the  center  —  he  never  smiled  when  he  kissed 


me  —  God,  why  couldn't  I  keep  him?  —  He  stayed  with 
me  a  year  and  there's  not  a  woman  in  the  troupe  who's 
had  him  more  than  a  month  —  he's  a  lying  rat,  but  he 
never  smiled  when  he  kissed  me  —  I  wonder  whether 
he'd  smile  if  I  slit  his  throat?  —  what  did  I  ever  see  in 
that  fat  face  —  he'll  be  a  joke  in  a  few  years  —  they  all 
throw  you  down  unless  you  get  in  ahead  of  them  —  If  I 
broke  a  bottle  against  his  mug  I'd  only  make  him  happy 
-  it  had  blue  silk  tassles  and  he  paid  three  hundred  for 
it  —  I  drank  too  much  —  blue  silk  tassles  —  He's  better 
than  most  of  them  —  I  knew  what  he  wanted  and  I'm 
bawling  him  out  because  he  got  it  —  He  treated  me  white 
—  blue  silk  garters  with  real  diamonds  that  would  make 
the  Queen  of  England  wink- 

The  devilishly  poignant  smile  and  the  monologue  met 
each  other  within  her,  while  fleeing  back  to  their  graves, 
and  their  unpremeditated  clash  illuminated  the  renuncia 
tion  upon  her  face.  She  looked  into  her  upturned,  yellow 
turban  as  though  it  held  elusive  dregs.  Brooding  experi 
mented  with  her  head  and  suddenly  threw  it  to  the 
ground,  dissatisfied.  She  lay  there  like  the  impoverished 
effigy  of  a  far  off  love  —  her  black  skirt  revealed  her  slim 
legs,  with  gloomy  discourtesy,  and  her  fluffy  pink  waist 
gave  its  babyish  sympathy  to  the  sharpness  of  her  back. 
Her  slender  but  muscular  arms,  stretching  over  the  grass, 
were  senseless  branches  touching  the  shoulders  of  the 
armless  effigy.,  The  wind  trifled  with  her  loose  brown 
hair  and  incited  it  to  ironically  flitting  imitations  of  life. 
Dead  thoughts  and  emotions  united  upon  her  hidden  face 
and  gripped  it  with  decayed  finesse.  She  rested,  peril 
ously  unconcerned,  upon  the  sloping  edge  of  the  cliff. 
Suddenly,  in  a  sibilant  prank,  the  earth  fled  beneath  her 
body  and  she  disappeared. 


[88] 


They  knelt  around  her  prostrate  figure  hugged  by  the 
pale  blue  indelicacy  of  tights  and  the  scant  impudence  of 
her  yellow  bodice.  High  above  her  a  little  wooden 
board  dangled  helplessly  from  a  long  wire,  while  another 
wire  hung  loosely  above  it.  She  opened  her  eyes  and 
stared,  with  a  lustreless  disbelief,  at  the  people  who  were 
like  a  tension  ready  to  snap. 

"  Damn  him,  he  did  me  dirty!  "  she  cried  to  the 
amazed,  painted  faces  above  her. 


HISTORY 

SUNLIGHT  stuck  to  the  gray  floor  like  curdled 
honey  and  clung  to  the  black  wall  like  visible 
fever  on  the  breast  of  a  savage.  This  contradiction 
gave  a  fugitive  radiance  to  the  room  in  which  King 
Ferdinand  stood,  moulding  figures  of  happiness.  On 
sunless  days  the  room  was  a  depressed  insult  to  his  re 
joicing,  forcing  it  into  adroit  retorts.  He  had  made  this 
chamber  a  necessary  enemy. 

As  he  moulded  his  figures  of  happiness,  his  wife  stood 
beside  him,  ready  with  colors. 

"  You  have  almost  finished  this  half-pyramid  of  eyes 
emerging  from  a  flat  surface  and  ending  against  a  vertical 
wall,"  she  said,  as  though  the  sound  of  her  words  made 
their  obviousness  subtle.  "  What  color  shall  I  use  to 
excite  your  design?  " 

King  Ferdinand  turned  to  her,  like  a  blind  man  peer 
ing  into  fantastically  returning  sight.  Creative  absorp 
tion  had  ruffled  his  middle-aged  face  into  an  ageless  in 
surrection,  but  when  he  spoke  a  wrinkled  order  once  more 
reigned  beneath  the  granite  lull  of  his  forehead. 

"  Give  each  eye  a  different  shade  of  color  and,  for  the 
wall,  make  a  blue  of  inhuman  brightness:  a  blue  that  has 
swallowed  a  constellation  and  defies  night,"  he  said. 
"  This  form  symbolises  my  last  happiness,  wherein  the 
clashing  sequences  of  my  life  have  been  smashed  to  a 
challenging  glare.  I  have  become  immortal  until  I  volun 
tarily  tender  my  immortality  to  death,  if  he  takes  it." 

The  wrinkles  on  King  Ferdinand's  cheeks  ascended  to 
a  sentence  of  belief  hacked  upon  his  forehead.  His  broad 
ly  cumbersome  face  shrunk  to  a  lighter  scope  and  his  red 
moustache  shone  like  a  coal  of  expectation.  His  wife 
played  with  her  dark  green  gown  as  though  it  were  re- 

[90] 


laxed  gaiety.  Her  body,  like  a  plump  blunder,  ended  in 
the  deft  recklessness  of  her  head;  the  high  amber  of 
her  face  raised  its  slightly  turned  lines  of  brooding  aban 
don.  She  looked  at  her  husband  as  though  she  considered 
his  flesh  an  unimportant  tragedy  calmed  by  his  words. 

The  smell  of  listening  earth  drifted  through  a  window 
and  bird-cries  violated  the  air,  like  expiring  emotions. 
King  Ferdinand  stood  in  the  manner  of  one  to  whom 
motion  has  become  a  dim  travesty,  and  the  blood  in  his 
veins  was  a  prisoned  resonance.  His  folded  arms  were 
weighted  in  a  marble  posture  beneath  his  long  sleeves. 
Queen  Muriel  touched  his  arm  and  gave  him  life.  She 
led  him  to  a  corner  of  the  room  and  unveiled  a  small 
figure,  and  her  hands  were  pliant  consummations. 

"  My  first  happiness,"  she  said,  in  a  voice  of  climbing 
distinctness.  They  carried  the  figure  to  the  light.  Al 
most  as  slim  as  a  personified  plant-stem,  a  conventional 
ised  monk  grew  straight  from  the  center  of  two  lean 
hands  cupped  into  the  semblance  of  a  flower-pot.  The 
hands  met  each  other  in  an  effortless  tenderness;  the 
thinly  high  monk  bore  the  suggestions  of  hood  and  cas 
sock  and  his  face  wore  a  look  of  indistinct  triumph. 

"And  so  I  like  to  believe  that  your  happiness  has 
grown  uncertainly  from  the  rarely  caught  touch  of  my 
hands,"  she  said. 

The  door  of  the  room  opened  and  two  men  strode  in. 
One  of  them  curved  upward  into  pompous  impatience. 
The  tight  inquisitiveness  of  a  gaudy  uniform  revealed 
his  tall  body.  His  face  was  like  an  expansive  fallacy  - 
large  rolls  of  flesh  indecisively  interrogated  the  thin  slant 
of  his  nose  and  slid  into  the  refuge  of  his  brown  beard. 
The  second  man  was  waspishly  abbreviated  and  clad  in 
mincing  castrations  of  color.  His  tinily  sharp  face  sug 
gested  a  soulless  beetle. 

"  Have  you  come,  as  usual,  to  bestow  your  explosive 


admiration  on  my  figures?  "  said  King  Ferdinand  to  the 
man  whose  face  resembled  a  redundant  mistake. 

"  Three  men  of  your  guard  will  murder  you,  with  re 
strained  admiration,  tomorrow  noon,"  answered  the  other 
man,  in  whose  voice  a  sneer  and  apprehension  were 
partners  in  a  minuet.  "  You  will  be  killed  on  the  palace 
steps  and  the  cheers  of  a  huge  audience  will  make  death's 
leer  articulate  to  you.  While  you  have  taken  the  role 
of  a  hermit  in  an  aesthetic  petticoat  your  friends  have 
been  arranging  a  last  happiness  for  you.  You  are  con 
sidered  an  imbecile  who  paints  pretty  figures  with  the 
blood  of  his  country." 

The  flashing  hardnesses  of  a  wintry  repose  assaulted 
King  Ferdinand's  face. 

"  My  brothers  are  quite  willing  to  use  this  blood  as 
an  unsolicited  rouge  for  the  lips  of  their  mistresses,"  he 
answered  in  a  tone  of  remotely  amused  reproach.  "  I 
have  not  assailed  my  subjects  with  taxes  or  led  them  to 
wars  and  that  has  been  a  serious  error.  They  are  prob 
ably  in  the  position  of  a  man  with  his  chains  removed, 
who  is  angry  because  he  has  forgotten  how  to  dance!  " 

The  acridly  shortened  man  spoke. 

"  When  you  are  dead,  sire,  your  brothers  will  gamble 
for  your  throne  by  throwing  roses  at  your  head.  He 
who  first  succeeds  in  striking  your  bulging  eyes,  will 
win." 

"  Death  does  not  like  to  be  made  a  cheated  jester," 
said  King  Ferdinand.  "  He  will  doubtless  devise  a  better 
joke  for  my  winning  brother." 

Queen  Muriel,  whose  face  had  grown  old  with  choked 
disdain,  stepped  forward. 

"  Now  that  your  shrewd  bantering  has  made  itself 
sufficiently  nude,  tell  us  why  you  have  come,"  she  said. 

The  tall  man,  who  carried  with  him  the  air  of  an  ani 
mated  mausoleum,  spoke. 

[92] 


"Today  I  saw  an  old  libertine  tottering  down  the 
boulevard.  Glancing  to  his  feet  he  spied  a  lily,  clipped 
and  fresh.  He  sidled  blithely  to  the  edge  of  the  walk  to 
avoid  stepping  on  the  flower.  There  is  little  pleasure, 
after  all,  in  flattening  a  child  from  another  world.  .  .  ! 
My  carriage  will  take  you  to  the  frontier,  tonight." 

"  My  caprices  have  never  been  able  to  strut  gorgeously 
because  they  hold  a  sincere  sympathy  for  motion,"  said 
King  Ferdinand,  still  mechanically  jesting.  His  hand 
rose  to  one  cheek  as  though  signaling  for  a  friendly  trance 
and  his  eyes  closed  unceremoniously. 

"We  will  take  your  carriage,"  he  said  in  the  voice 
of  an  abstracted  tight-rope  walker. 

The  two  men  tilted  their  gaudiness  into  imperceptible 
bows  and  departed.  King  Ferdinand  and  his  wife  stood 
staring  at  each  other  as  though  their  bodies  were  teasing 
curtains.  Then,  without  remembering  what  had  occurred, 
they  let  gay  words  poke  each  other  and  began  to  discuss 
colors  for  the  monk's  figure  rising  from  cupped  hands 
and  blossoming  into  indistinct  triumph. 

That  night  their  carriage  stopped  upon  a  hilltop  and 
they  were  killed  by  three  men.  One  of  the  three  had  a 
thin  nose  and  a  brown  beard  —  the  tight  inquisitiveness 
of  a  bright  uniform  revealed  his  tall  body.  Among 
historians  he  was  to  be  noted  as  the  man  who  killed  an 
imbecile  king  and  led  his  country  to  glory  and  prosperity. 


[93] 


PSYCHIC   PHENOMENA 

CARL  DELL  and  Anita  Starr  were  speaking  of  a 
dead  woman  who  had  influenced  their  eyes.  She 
had  also  refined  their  heads  to  a  chill  protest. 
Their  faces,  involved  and  disconsolate,  had  not  solved 
her  absence,  and  their  voices  were  freighted  with  a  primi 
tive  martyrdom.  Carl  was  fencing  with  the  end  of  his 
youth.  His  body  held  that  inpenetrable  cringing  which 
pretends  to  ignore  the  coming  of  middle  age  and  is  only 
betrayed  by  rare  gestures.  He  was  tall,  with  a  slender- 
ness  that  barely  escaped  being  feminine.  The  upper 
part  of  his  face  was  scholarly  and  the  lower  part  roguish, 
and  the  two  gave  him  the  effect  of  a  sprite  who  has  be 
come  erudite  but  still  retains  the  memory  of  his  former 
identity.  His  protruding  eyes  were  embarrassed,  as 
though  someone  behind  them  had  unexpectedly  pushed 
them  from  a  refuge.  With  immence  finesse  they  apolo 
gised  for  intruding  upon  the  world.  It  is  almost  tautology 
to  say  that  they  were  gray.  His  small  brown  moustache 
had  a  candidly  misplaced  air  as  it  touched  the  thin 
bacchanale  of  his  lips.  It  was  a  mourner  at  the  feast. 

Anita  Starr's  form  would  have  seemed  stout  but  for 
the  sweeping  discipline  of  its  lines,  but  this  careful  sup 
pression  ended  in  a  riot  when  it  came  to  her  face.  Her 
face  was  a  small,  lyrical  revel  that  had  terminated  in 
a  fight.  Her  nose  and  chin  were  strident  but  her  cheeks 
and  mouth  were  subtlety  unassuming.  Her  blue  eyes 
brilliantly  and  impartially  aided  both  sides  of  the  con 
flict.  Glistening  spirals  of  reddish  brown  hair  courted 
her  head. 

Sitting  in  the  parlor  of  the  Starr  home  Anita  and  Carl 
spoke  of  a  dead  woman  who  had  influenced  their  eyes. 
It  was  two  A.  M.  and  the  atmosphere  resembled  a  dis 
illusioned  reminiscence:  still  and  heavy.  They  had 

[94] 


talked  about  this  dead  woman  throughout  the  evening, 
welcoming  any  sound  that  might  surprise  her  profile  into 
life.  When  alive  she  had  been  the  chanting  whirlpool 
of  their  existences,  and  when  she  died  sound  ceased  for 
them.  Their  voices  became  mere  copies  of  its  past 
reign. 

"  Because  I  loved  her  any  common  pebble  became  a 
chance  word  concerning  her  and  flowers  were  enthusias 
tic  anecdotes  of  her  presence,"  said  Carl. 

For  an  hour  he  had  been  breaking  his  love  into  in 
satiable  variations  —  one  who  seduces  the  fleeting  expres 
sions  of  a  past  torture. 

"  She  may  have  been  an  august  vagabond  from  another 
planet  —  a  planet  where  loitering  is  a  solemn  profes 
sion,"  said  Anita.  "  Even  when  she  performed  a  menial 
task  she  awed  it  with  her  thoughtful  reluctance.  Like  a 
fitful  gleaner  she  crept  through  bare  fields  of  people, 
accepting  their  bits  of  laughter  and  refusal.  When  she 
met  us  she  stepped  backward,  as  from  a  tempting  unre 
ality,  and  knocked  against  death." 

Carl  sat,  like  a  groveling  fantasy  weary  of  attempting 
to  capture  a  genuine  animation,  but  Anita  had  forced 
herself  into  a  tormented  erectness.  The  clock  struck 
three.  Without  a  word  or  glance  in  each  other's  direc 
tion  they  left  their  chairs,  turned  out  the  lights,  and 
ascended  the  stairway,  Carl  slightly  in  advance.  They 
halted  at  the  first  landing  and  faced  each  other  with  the 
uncomplaining  helplessness  of  people  suddenly  scalded 
by  reality. 

"  In  the  morning  we  will  eat  oranges  from  a  silver  dish 
and  glibly  cheat  our  emotions,"  said  Carl. 

"  This  deftly  impolite  proceeding  never  stops  to  ask 
our  consent/'  said  Anita  in  a  voice  whose  lethargy  barely 
observed  a  satirical  twinkle. 

Another  word  would  have  been  a  ridiculous  impro- 

[95] 


priety.  They  parted  and  entered  their  rooms.  Flower 
scents  filtered  through  Carl's  open  window,  like  softly 
dismayed  sins  and  the  cool  repentance  of  a  summer  night 
glided  into  his  room  upon  a  pathway  of  moonlight.  For 
a  while  he  sat  absent-mindedly  burnishing  the  knives  that 
had  divided  his  evening.  After  he  had  undressed  he  fell 
upon  his  bed  like  one  hurriedly  obliterating  an  ordeal. 
His  consciousness  played  with  a  black  hood;  then  a 
crash  mastered  the  room  and  the  door  swung  open.  His 
blanched  face  paid  a  spasmodic  tribute  to  the  sound  and 
his  grey  eyes  greeted  the  darkness  as  though  it  were  an 
advancing  mob.  With  a  strained  stoicism  he  waited  for  a 
repetition  of  the  sound.  The  moments  were  sledge 
hammers  fanning  his  face  with  their  close  passage.  Then 
his  bed  weirdly  meddled  with  his  body  and  became  a 
light  cradle  rocked  by  some  arrogant  hand.  The  dark 
ness  tingled  lifelessly,  like  an  electrocuted  man. 

Carl's  waiting  began  to  feel  sharply  disgraced  and  his 
senses  planned  a  revolt.  He  tried  to  rise  to  a  sitting 
posture  but  his  body  insulted  his  desire.  At  this  point 
the  darkness  softened  to  the  disguised  struggle  of  a 
woman  striving  to  reach  him.  The  significance  of  this 
cast  an  impalpable  but  potent  consolation  upon  the  strain 
ing  of  his  chained  body.  The  rocking  of  his  bed  meas 
ured  a  powerfully  cryptic  welcome  and  he  tried  to  de 
cipher  it  with  the  beat  of  his  heart.  Each  of  its  syllables 
became  the  cadenced  impact  of  another  person  against 
a  toughly  pliant  wall.  His  body  demolished  its  tenseness 
and  pressed  a  refrain  into  the  swaying  bed.  He  deco 
rated  the  darkness  with  the  crisp  flight  of  his  voice. 

"  Perish  upon  the  turmoil  of  each  day  and  make  it 
inaudible,  but  let  the  night  be  our  hermitage,"  he  cried 
to  a  dead  woman.  As  though  replying,  the  rocking  of 
his  bed  gradually  lessened  and  the  darkness  became  an 
opaque  farewell.  He  turned  to  the  shaft  of  moonlight 

[96] 


which  was  tactfully  intercepting  the  floor  of  his  room; 
it  had  the  unobtrusive  intensity  of  a  melted  Chinaman. 
For  hours  he  gave  it  his  eyes  and  dimly  contradicted  it 
with  his  heart.  When  the  dawn  made  his  room  aware  of 
its  limitations,  he  closed  his  eyes. 

At  the  breakfast  table  he  and  Anita  greeted  each  other 
with  a  worn  brevity:  their  eyes  found  an  empty  solace 
in  the  white  tablecloth  and  their  minds  felt  a  bright 
impotence,  like  beggars  idling  in  the  sun.  For  a  while 
the  tinkle  of  their  spoons  amiably  pardoned  their  con 
straint,  but  Anita  finally  spoke  with  the  staccato  of  one 
who  snaps  unbearable  thongs. 

"  She  came  to  me  last  night.  I  heard  a  sound  like  a 
huge  menace  stumbling  over  a  chair.  The  door  opened 
and  the  darkness  grew  as  heavy  as  dead  flesh.  My  bed 
swayed  with  the  precision  of  a  grieving  head." 

Carl's  face  broke  and  gleamed  like  a  soft  ground 
flogged  by  sudden  rain. 

"  The  same  things  happened  to  me/'  he  said  in  the 
voice  of  a  child  wrestling  with  a  minor  chord. 

They  sat  heavily  disputing  each  other  with  their  eyes. 

"  Did  you  lie  afterwards,  censuring  the  moonlight?  " 
asked  Anita. 

Carl  nodded.  Anita's  mother  majestically  blundered 
into  the  room.  Exuberantly  substantial,  with  the  face 
of  a  child  skillfully  rebuked  by  an  elderly  masquerade, 
she  flattered  a  chair  at  the  table. 

"  Wasn't  that  a  terrible  storm  we  had  last  night,"  she 
babbled.  "  The  rain  kept  me  awake  for  hours  —  I'm 
such  a  light  sleeper,  you  know.  I  do  hope  you  children 
managed  to  rest." 


[97] 


LOVE 

THE  night  received  the  moonlight  in  the  manner 
of  a  sophisticated  braggart  who  slaps  the  face  of 
an  old,  impassive  man.  Mrs.  Robert  Calvin 
Taylor  observed  this  illusion  and  painted  it  upon  one  of 
the  lanterns  lighting  a  little  party  within  her  heart.  The 
guests  at  the  party,  fat  sophists  and  slatterns  in  gay, 
patched  clothes,  gathered  around  the  lantern  and  felt  re 
lieved  at  the  impersonal  novelty  of  its  decoration.  If 
Mrs.  Robert  Calvin  Taylor  had  been  a  philosopher  or 
a  scientist  she  would  have  changed  the  night  to  an  un 
seen  background,  or  a  chemical  diagram;  she  would 
have  ignored  the  pleading  of  her  heart  for  pictorial  dis 
traction.  But  since  she  was  a  society-woman,  tired  of 
sensual  toys  and  a  mental  twilight,  she  welcomed  the 
night  as  her  first  effectual  lover.  Sitting  in  the  garden 
of  her  country  home  she  could  see  the  lighted  windows 
of  her  crowded  ballroom,  and  hear  the  saccharine  pan 
demonium  of  a  jazz  orchestra.  The  noise  reminded  her 
of  a  middle-aged  roue,  snickering  as  he  rolled  his  huge 
dice  while  gambling  for  a  new  mistress.  She  felt  glad 
that  her  new  lover,  the  night,  did  not  seek  to  court  her 
with  such  a  blustering  clatter. 

The  night  was  incredibly  sophisticated  but  held  the 
pungently  awkward  body  of  a  youth,  crashing  against 
trees  and  bushes.  This  mixture  pierced  Mrs.  Robert 
Calvin  Taylor  and  slid  far  beneath  those  sensual  routines 
which  are  the  delight  of  psycho-analysts  —  slid  to  a 
depth  where  aesthetic  passion  slays  the  flesh  and  blends 
it  into  a  sexless  potency.  She  felt  a  sense  of  bodiless 
conflagration  striding  with  wide  steps  beside  the  night. 
When  the  limitless  glow  died  within  her,  she  glanced 
down  and  found  that  she  was  naked.  The  complicated 
shrewdness  of  her  clothes  had  disappeared. 

[98] 


By  this  time  she  had  ceased  to  be  Mrs.  Robert  Cal 
vin  Taylor  —  she  had  become  an  expectant  novice  in  a 
new  world,  and  even  the  jazz  music  and  ballroom 
laughter  had  changed  to  the  mumbled  rumours  of  a 
past  existence.  Therefore  her  nakedness  failed  to  dis 
concert  her.  She  touched  her  shoulder,  with  a  gesture 
of  matter-of-fact  congratulation,  and  loosened  her  hair 
to  rid  herself  of  a  last  dab  of  incongruity.  Then  she  rose 
from  the  stone  bench  and  walked  down  a  pathway  lead 
ing  to  the  great  lake  that  bounded  one  side  of  her  country 
estate.  She  felt  the  powerful  and  sober  curiosity  of  one 
who  has  decided  to  become  a  recluse  and  examines  the 
deserted  possibilities  of  his  roofless  plateau.  She  reached 
a  high  bluff  rising  over  the  placid  vanity  of  the  huge 
lake,  combing  its  bluish  black  hair  with  moonlight.  Sud 
denly  she  became  aware  of  a  figure  standing  beside  her. 
She  turned  with  a  gasp  of  strangled  aloofness.  The 
ethereal  composure  of  her  small  face,  defended  by  moon 
light,  sheered  into  an  ebony  cast  of  hermit-like  annoy 
ance.  But  when  the  color  and  outlines  of  the  figure 
shrunk  within  her  eyes,  her  face  changed  again.  An 
astounded  immersion  crowned  her  head,  tugging  at  her 
short  nose,  straightening  her  thick  lips,  and  cleaving  her 
gray  eyes.  The  slightly  deteriorated  slenderness  of  her 
short  body  lowered  a  bit  toward  the  earth,  not  from 
fear  but  because  of  a  weakening  incredulity.  The  figure 
before  her  was  that  of  a  sexless  human  being,  small  and 
slim  of  statute,  nude,  and  hued  with  an  inhumanly  con 
centrated  black.  The  head  held  large  eyes  that  shone 
like  metaphysical  diamonds,  as  though  ten  thousand 
stars  were  carousing  together,  in  a  realm  of  compressed 
light.  The  figure  spoke  to  Mrs.  Robert  Calvin  Taylor, 
and  its  voice  seemed  thrown  forth  by  the  rays  from  its 
eyes.  The  voice  was  distinct  and  subdued. 

[99] 


"  You  are  not  a  hermit  who  has  turned  a  garden  into 
a  solitary  castle,"  said  the  figure. 

"  What  am  I?  "  asked  Mrs.  Robert  Calvin  Taylor. 

"  Your  mind  and  heart  are  no  longer  clad  in  their 
heavy  mirages  of  love,  fear,  and  sleep,"  said  the  figure. 
"  The  surface  pictures  have  gone  and  the  twin  bazaars 
of  your  heart  and  mind  are  exchanging  a  long-deferred 
greeting.  Within  the  now  mingled  bazaars  emotions  and 
thoughts  have  become  friends  and  sell  each  other  endless 
variations  in  color,  light,  and  form.  I  am  the  being  who 
rules  this  proceeding." 

"  Have  you  a  name?  "  asked  Mrs.  Robert  Calvin 
Taylor,  using  the  unashamed  naivete  of  a  child. 

"  Men  call  me  Aesthetics,"  answered  the  figure.  "In 
my  weakest  form  I  make  the  eyes  of  the  shop-girl  hesi 
tate  a  bit,  as  she  views  an  unusually  gaudy  sunset.  In 
my  strongest  manifestations  I  help  poets  and  artists  to 
contradict  their  personal  lives.  But  these  are  merely 
my  outward  indications.  I  line  the  hearts  and  minds  of 
all  human  beings,  often  remaining  within  them,  unfelt, 
until  they  die.  In  rare  cases  such  as  yours  the  mirages 
hiding  and  dividing  me  are  slain,  and  I  clap  my  hands, 
sending  motion  to  the  twin  bazaars  of  heart  and  mind." 

"  What  caused  me  to  uncover  you  within  myself?  " 
said  Mrs.  Robert  Calvin  Taylor. 

"  You  yielded  to  a  whim  and  made  the  night  your 
lover.  Dissatisfied  with  the  loves  and  fears  he  found 
within  you,  the  night  threw  them  aside,  one  by  one,  thus 
slaying  the  mirages  that  hid  me.  Your  other  lovers  of 
the  past  were  content  with  more  material  gifts  and  did 
not  seek  to  uncover  you." 

"  I  am  bare  now.  What  will  you  do  with  me?  "  said 
Mrs.  Robert  Calvin  Taylor.  The  figure  laid  a  hand  upon 
her  shoulder.  His  eyes  burnt  her  to  a  petal  of  ashes 
that  fell  down  between  them. 

[100] 


Mr.  Robert  Calvin  Taylor  stood  over  the  form  of  his 
young  wife,  who  sat  slouched  down  upon  a  stone  bench 
within  their  garden.  He  shook  her  shoulder,  lightly.  She 
uttered  a  perturbed  mumble  and  did  not  raise  the  head 
resting  upon  one  of  her  arms.  The  moonlight  fell  upon 
the  silken  complexities  of  her  dress. 

"  Poor  Dot,  I  warned  her  not  to  take  a  third  glass," 
he  muttered  to  himself  as  he  raised  her  in  his  arms  and 
staggered  down  the  garden  pathway. 


[101] 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AN     INITIAL    FINE    OF    25    CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  SO  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  $1.OO  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


17  1d33 


DEC  & 

SEP  26  1942 

270ct'5. 
3M*52H 
18Feb52U 


OCT241954 
( 


REC'D  LD 

DEC    6 

230ct60(.E 


OCT 


REC'D 


LD  21-50wi-l,'3 


U.C.  BERKELEY  LIBRARIES 


(1003380^4 


468543 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


